Chapter 220: The Birth of Morgan le Fay
"Go get some rest, Melusine."
Beneath the Ural Mountains, the Roman camp smoldered with torchlight. Rowe watched the small figure retreat into the sea of tents.
Compared to her earlier hesitation, Melusine now moved with a clear purpose. No more drifting. No more second guessing.
No need to force meaning. No need to panic.
Living was already the answer.
And she understood something else as well. As long as she stayed near Rowe, she would not be alone.
That realization steadied her. In exchange, the loyalty she offered became honest to the point of recklessness.
"Congratulations. You lured another one, did you not?"
The evening breeze was gentle, yet a voice arrived from distant Rome as if it were whispering directly into Rowe's ear.
Rowe exhaled and lifted his eyes.
At some point, the moon had changed.
Bright lunar light now carried veins of blood red, as if the sky itself had been wounded and the wound refused to close.
The Crimson Moon hung above the camp.
"Is this the Moon Cell's counterattack?" Rowe asked.
"Exactly. I told you I was not lying." Merlin's voice sounded amused. Though she was in Rome, atop the Fairy Eye's Clock Tower, her message slid straight into his mind. "I do not know what that thing on the lunar surface truly is, but I can feel an eye like a vortex there. If I try to look at it too hard, it feels like my eyes will explode."
Rowe's gaze sharpened.
"Is that what you have been coveting this whole time?"
"Guess."
Rowe paused.
"Do you want me to guess whether I will guess or not?"
"Are you playing nesting dolls with me?" Merlin's tone brightened. "Guess."
Silence.
Rowe raised a hand and curled his fingers, slow and deliberate.
A soft snap of intent.
In Rome, at the top of the Clock Tower, a sharp cry erupted as if someone had been flicked in the forehead by the hand of God.
Through the highest window, Merlin toppled backward. Her black stockings flashed in the candlelight as her legs flailed for balance.
"Ow…"
She sat up with a wounded pout, rubbing the red mark on her forehead like someone who had just learned that consequences were real.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs.
Brisisan appeared, dragging her robes, clutching a book, her expression alarmed.
"Merlin, what happened?"
"Nothing." Merlin waved it off at once, forcing her voice into casual cheer. "I was just playing."
It truly hurt. No wonder Nero's occasional yelps had sounded so undignified. Merlin had always assumed the Emperor was being dramatic.
Apparently, Rome's Adjutant was simply cruel.
Brisisan hovered closer, still worried.
"Are you really all right? Even if you are a fairy, Teacher Solomon said fairies are formed from fantasies, and even fairies can have problems."
"I said I am fine." Merlin shook her head, flinging the pain away like an unwanted thought. Then her eyes brightened, shamelessly switching tracks. "More importantly, you promised to teach me the Magic King's magecraft. Do not forget."
"Of course I will not forget." Brisisan lifted the book. "I am the Magic King's last disciple. What I oversee is inheritance. I should spread the magecraft of the Seventy Two Demon God Pillars that my teacher created."
She spoke with a kind of stubborn pride that did not fit her delicate frame.
"I would be happy if you can learn it."
Brisisan rushed off again, the gait of a several hundred year old magus somehow indistinguishable from a child who had remembered a treasure buried in the backyard.
Merlin watched her go, amused.
Perhaps that was precisely why Solomon chose her as his final student. Mystery could extend life, but if the mind could not remain young, the spirit would rot first.
Merlin sighed, then muttered toward the invisible line connecting her to the north.
"And you. That really hurt, Mister Rowe."
In the Ural camp, Rowe stepped back toward his tent.
"Brisisan?" he replied. "Solomon found her."
Above, the blood red tint deepened. Moonlight fell like diluted gore, staining the camp, staining even the snow on the peaks with an eerie gloss.
Rowe's mind returned to the name that had been spoken on the Moon.
"The Crimson Moon. Brunestud."
As a transmigrator, Rowe knew that name. Earth's satellite did have an Ultimate One. The Moon's Ultimate One.
The Crimson Moon. Brunestud.
Yet in the future he knew, that Moon Princess would be born only if the Moon Cell did not exist, or if it never activated. Once the Moon Cell was awake, it became the Moon's ruling system, its own kind of Ultimate One. Brunestud would have no ground to stand on. No place to be born.
And yet, now, the Moon Cell had released it.
Not as an accident, but as a response.
Human Order, swelling under Rome, was eroding its source from below. So the Moon Cell, in its vast deductions and stored possibilities, pulled out the concept of Brunestud and set it loose like a blade.
If that was true, then the Crimson Moon aided by the Moon Cell would be far more dangerous than the Brunestud Rowe remembered.
"It might be, or it might not," Merlin replied, her voice slightly more serious now. "The lunar surface does not belong to this world in the same way. My eye cannot see it clearly."
Rowe paused outside his tent.
Then he asked what mattered.
"Why are you warning me?"
"With your personality, keeping it secret would let you watch an even more exciting development."
Merlin fell silent for a heartbeat.
Then she spoke, slower.
"I changed."
It sounded almost unfamiliar even to her.
"Hm. After leaving Avalon, I feel humans might not be mere tools after all."
Merlin was not fully certain why. But she was certain of her own shape of thought.
"I still want pleasure. But compared to pure pleasure, I want to see a complete story more."
"I do not want this play to stop halfway because the protagonist dies."
Her voice softened, then sharpened with something that might have been sincerity.
"So please do your best, my protagonist."
The connection snapped cleanly.
The camp returned to ordinary sound. Wind. Cloth. Distant steps.
The blood moon remained.
Rowe smiled.
For a human, for a transmigrator, there was a particular kind of pride in watching a chaotic observer turn toward something like responsibility because of you.
Merlin had changed.
That did not solve the crisis.
She would not help him in the coming threat. She could not.
The one who could stand beside him was already here.
"Only I."
The central command tent's flap opened.
Einzbern sat inside with a book, the firelight painting her silver hair with warm edges. She looked up and smiled as if she had been waiting for the next move on a board that never truly left her mind.
She blinked, crimson eyes bright.
"I heard everything. The Ultimate One on the Moon." Her voice carried a quiet hunger. "I can feel it. Her existence can help me complete the Third Magic, cannot it?"
"It can." Rowe did not conceal what he knew from someone this close. "If I remember correctly, the Crimson Moon has an ability called Conceptualization of Reality."
He stepped inside.
"It originally required Earth's inhibitory force to fully manifest. But with the Moon Cell supporting it, I suspect it will become even more terrifying."
He met her eyes.
"That is the power of creating something from nothing."
"It resembles your Soul Realization."
Einzbern's fingers closed around the book's spine. Then she shut it, slow and absolute.
"If that is true, then we cannot allow it to slip away."
If the Third Magic remained incomplete, she could not sustain a human form eternally. She could not reach the realm of the primordial human.
And she could not truly stand beside Rowe.
That had been the reason Athena wore the name Einzbern in the first place.
To be with him.
Everything else was noise. Everything else could be discarded.
For a goddess of wisdom, sacrificing the small for the great was not a difficult calculation.
Those were thoughts for later.
For now, she stood, stepped close, and pressed Rowe into a chair as if concluding an argument with a single gesture.
"Shall we continue?"
She swung a leg over him, straddling him with calm certainty.
Time passed.
Night thinned.
And then the sun rose.
Rowe and Einzbern emerged from the central tent side by side.
Outside, the camp had already formed up.
Melusine stood with a quiet steadiness that had not been there before.
Boudica waited in white, armor layered over cloth, her posture graceful even in steel.
Barghest grinned like a warrior who had not had enough.
Baobhan Sith hovered close, eyes bright with a need she did not bother hiding.
Beyond them, the legions stood in ranks that stretched left and right like a forest made from men.
Sand lifted. Dust swirled.
Spears rose like rain frozen mid fall.
Swords, shields, and polished armaments interwove into a single mass of intent.
Rowe stepped forward into the morning light and looked across them.
"You still have a chance now."
Every face turned toward him.
They gathered because he ordered it. Because this journey had reached its edge.
But he intended to continue.
And he did not demand that everyone follow.
"For those who want to return home, I already arranged it with His Majesty Nero. You will receive funds. You will receive positions based on your merit."
He spoke evenly, making each offer sound like it carried weight.
"You can enter official schools as instructors, or join any legion stationed anywhere in Rome's lands as an officer."
"And for those who do not wish to return home, you may remain here."
He let the choice stand naked.
"Those who return will go back as heroes."
"Those who continue will greet even greater glory as heroes."
"Choose."
"I."
Boudica stepped forward first.
She had been born in Britannia. She had once been the person who longed most desperately to return.
Now she stood under a foreign sun and did not flinch.
"I am willing to continue."
Her voice rang clean across the ranks.
"I will leave myself here, and I will bring glory to my homeland."
She did not go home.
But she believed her homeland would be glorified by the path she chose.
"May I leave myself here, and bring glory to my homeland."
"May I remain here, and return home with glory."
After her, countless voices joined.
Spears lifted higher.
Swords struck shields.
The sound was not a cheer. It was an oath hammered into metal.
Barghest laughed, broad and delighted.
"I have not had enough fighting yet. My Lord, you cannot send me away."
Baobhan Sith lifted her skirt slightly, as if mimicking a curtsey she had learned from watching humans.
"I still want to keep hearing your praise."
Melusine did not speak.
She simply moved behind Rowe and tugged lightly at his cloak.
A quiet claim.
Not everyone stayed.
Of course not.
Human hearts were fickle, and more complicated than any war plan.
Rowe did not judge those who turned back.
He simply accepted the nature of people.
Then he drew his sword.
Steel flashed.
The Roman blade was clean, bright, merciless in its honesty.
He pointed it toward the sky.
"Those who wish to return, we part here. Rome will welcome you."
His gaze swept the ones who remained.
"And those who stay, come with me."
"Forward. We continue."
The army moved like a single organism. Dust rose. The line of Rome flowed past the Ural Mountains.
History, later, would describe what followed.
They would say the Ural was not the end.
They would say the snow swept plains of North Asia were not the limit.
They would say even the Parthians, in West Asia, described Rome's formations as an army sent down by gods, spears cast by deities, whips left by God on earth.
They would say that even now, in the remains of that royal city, fragments of a statue remained.
A Roman marshal riding his horse over the wall.
They would say Solomon's Seventy Two Demon God Pillars supported the modern foundation of magecraft, and Rowe's Twelve Apostle Arts catalyzed it further at the beginning of the Common Era.
They would say the art of summoning Fairy Apostles became a mystery second only to true magic, chased by countless magi.
They would say every Fairy Sorcerer carried the potential to touch the Root.
They would call Rowe the Fairy King of Paradise.
They would argue, politically and bitterly, that the birth of a Fairy King outside Paradise forced the premature birth of Paradise's true King.
A thesis would be written.
Clock Tower Thesis, Origin of the Fairy Mage.
Authored by Waver Velvet.
And in Paradise, far from Rome, far from blood and iron, the Sea of Stars shimmered with a light too clean for human eyes.
Countless formless fairies drifted, laughed, whispered.
"I heard those eleven fairies who left earlier are doing very well."
"That half nightmare trickster did not deceive us this time?"
"Going to the human world. I want to go too."
Then someone hesitated.
"Did you hear something?"
The voices died at once.
Because they all heard it.
A faint sound, echoing from the deepest part of Paradise.
Not speech. Not laughter.
A cracking.
As if something inside an egg had decided the world was no longer allowed to be stable.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
Mottled, then shattered.
Something was born.
It was a fairy.
And yet, it stood above ordinary fairies.
Not an airy thing that drifted with whim, but a supreme fairy born to bear responsibility.
An existence created to correct Paradise itself.
Her name was Morgan le Fay.
Her true form was Paradise's final self correction device.
Born to maintain Paradise.
.....
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