He had used everything at his disposal.
Every authority he'd been granted—from the moment he was seated on the false throne until the day he was cast out—he'd spent it all. He rummaged through the royal treasury's ancient magical tools without rest, hunting until he found the combination that most fully drew out his current power, and armed himself with it without hesitation.
A rumor had spread that magic was not an inborn gift, so he'd honed his skills through self-study to the utmost of his ability.
He'd wrung information about his enemy out of the king's own elite unit—the very soldiers who had fought that enemy directly—and based on their intelligence, he'd prepared every countermeasure within his reach.
He had not left behind a single unnecessary thing. He had sacrificed everything.
The physical deterioration from heavy use of ancient magical tools, the risk of irreversible aftereffects—he couldn't afford to care about any of that.
Everything, everything, all of it. He had cast aside his past and his future, steeled himself to throw away even his own life, and devoted every last shred of his existence solely to defeating that enemy.
And then.
"Come on, couldn't you have tried a little harder?"
He had been utterly powerless.
Everything he had built, everything he had staked—it was all swept aside as though none of it mattered. Not a single blow had landed. He'd been kicked into the dirt without the faintest resistance.
None of his magic had worked. Every ounce of his effort had been for nothing.
...This world was decided entirely by what you were born with.
It was the cruelly impartial injustice that Helk had been forced to taste from the very day he was born, now given form before his eyes.
"...I think I might be starting to understand."
Karma, standing perfectly composed, spoke down at Helk, who lay sprawled on the ground—having exhausted everything yet fallen impossibly short.
"I'd been wondering about something. Why are you people so terrible at magic? Why do you need strange words or incomprehensible tools every time you want to cast a spell, and yet your magic is still so pathetically weak?"
He paused there for a beat.
"But after fighting so many other humans... and especially after fighting you over and over, I finally understand. Ah, I see."
He smiled warmly and declared:
"—Everyone except me... is unbelievably... amazing... at being awful."
He delivered this irrefutable truth alongside a smile of immaculate beauty.
"So that's how it is. Everyone other than me is terrible at using magic. You need words or tools every single time, and even then you can only manage magic far weaker than mine. ...I see."
And finally—his lips curling into something eerily unsettling.
"That... feels absolutely... wonderful."
"Ghk!"
"Yep. Thanks, Prince. Fighting you and learning from you—because of that, I finally understand just how weak, foolish, and fragile humans truly are. Thanks to you, I think I'll be able to use magic with even more confidence from now on. ...Thank you, for my sake, okay?"
That, of course, was the ultimate insult to Helk.
"Y-Your Highness—!"
He converted his fury into fuel and forced himself to his feet. Ignoring the creaking pain throughout his body, he pushed through it, activated his magical tools at full power to supplement himself, allowed himself to become a puppet to those tools if need be, raised his magic power, and launched a spell.
《White Calm Serpent》—a bloodline ice magic. It was supposed to possess the power befitting a spell cast by royalty, and yet.
"That was probably the most boring one out of all your spells."
Far before it could reach Karma, it was easily stopped by a barrier spell. As though he'd grown tired of even looking at it, Karma deflected it with effortless ease, and in the same breath, activated his own magic.
Each spell was far more powerful than Helk's, wildly varied in nature—and even a single one of them carried a level of power that Helk could never hope to match in a lifetime. They rained down on him solely to toy with him.
"Come on, try using more spells like these! Wonderful ones, dazzling ones, powerful ones, beautiful ones! You can't? No, you really can't. How limited. How sad."
"Nn... da... mn..."
"Come on, show me more of that frustrated look. Seeing humans make that face makes me feel so good. If you can't even manage that... then I think your role is already over."
Those words hung over Helk as he endured the onslaught of magic.
(Why... why can't I reach him? I'm not enough. Even though I've poured everything into this—If only I could do this one thing, nothing else would matter!)
Yet even as he thought that, the answer was already clear inside him.
Ah, yes. Helk's circumstances might warrant a degree of sympathy. Wanting this one thing above all else wasn't necessarily wrong—it was an earnest, desperate wish that deserved to be understood.
But.
—None of that mattered to Karma.
No matter how consuming the wish, no matter how much of himself he'd poured into it, no matter how many layers of will and anguish backed his stand on that battlefield...
Karma didn't care. And it wasn't just Karma—for anyone other than Helk, it was nothing more than someone else's story.
So from the other side's perspective, Helk was merely convenient prey to help him understand his own nature and evolve. Once he'd served his purpose, he could be crushed without a second thought. In the end, the cruel, impartial law of the strong devouring the weak was the truth of this world—and those who lacked the power to make their wishes reality simply died.
...If even that power was determined at birth, then what difference was there between that and having no right to exist at all?
Yes. That was precisely why.
Why no one knew—and no one cared—that Helk was willing to throw everything away just to defeat this one enemy. And why, if he couldn't even accomplish that, he might as well have fallen halfway through; for anyone other than him, it was nothing more than an utterly trivial matter.
So.
"I think this is about over. Since there doesn't seem to be anything left for me to gain, I'll just kill you. Bye-bye~"
Karma raised his magical power as though simply grinding an infantryman under his boot—his magic shattered through even the defenses of the ancient magical tools and surged toward Helk to deliver the killing blow—just before it reached him.
"Formula Replay—《Spirit Veil》"
As though the world itself had decided this was the moment.
The silver-haired boy—Ermes—activated a barrier spell that blocked Karma's magic, and saved Helk like a hero rushing to the aid of someone in desperate need.
—Helk's wish to win alone, and his secret hope that if he couldn't manage even that, he'd rather just be allowed to lose...
He'd trampled all of it—without hesitation, without mercy, without even realizing it... and for Ermes, it was probably none of his concern either.
And therefore.
"...Are you injured, Your Highness Helk?"
Saving people as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Worrying about others as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Receiving the calm, measured words of a boy who had been chosen by the world—whose desires aligned with the world's, and who had been granted ample power and qualification to fulfill that role.
"..."
Envy. Jealousy. Despair. Resentment.
A tangled mess of emotions twisted across Helk's face as he could only stare.
And so it was—the classic tale of someone who gets rescued by the hero at the moment of crisis.
Next time, they might find a clue to defeating Karma. Stay tuned!