Harghent's own heart was a mystery.
Despite already struggling enough to comprehend the hearts of the citizens and his men, he constantly understood even less about himself.
Which was why there might have been some part of his heart that was grateful for Uhak the Silent's sudden intrusion.
Pursuing Mestelexil after he abruptly showed himself was a job that only Harghent, who happened to be nearby, could accomplish. If, by any chance, he was able to capture the golem, the accomplishment may likely have been more than enough to make up for his foolish and unauthorized mobilization.
However, in exchange, he might have ultimately given up on his decisive battle against Alus.
Since, if he was engaged in a battle no one else could shoulder, then he could use it as his excuse.
He could plaster over his desire not to meet with Alus, now transformed into Aureatia's enemy, and his feelings of obligation for driving the wyvern into the abyss of death, by convincing himself that he had acted properly.
I don't need to be there.
Of course.
Where they were heading, hero candidates, far and away more powerful than Harghent, may have already come together. Aureatia's military, without Harghent doing anything, may already have readied as much equipment and troop strength as they could muster, and encircled Alus with impeccably tactical strategy.
Even if Harghent barged into the battle camp from the outside, he would bring nothing more than the inconsequential strength of a single individual soldier—not just that, he might end up actively becoming a hindrance to the operation.
In which case, the still better outcome would be that the battle was long over already.
He pictured himself if Aureatia's side claimed victory, quietly lingering as
the triumphant victory songs of the soldiers echoed around him.
The opposite was just as meaningless. It could end with him simply gazing out, with disappointment and despair, at the charred remnants, everything mowed down by Alus the Star Runner's hand.
No matter what the end result, no one would pay a passing thought to Harghent's existence at all.
…Unnecessary. I've only ever been unnecessary.
It was always how the battles of Harghent the Still had gone. He was only ever skilled at shooting down wyverns.
In the past, that was a truly sought-after skill in order to preserve peace.
I know. The truth is, I don't need to race around the frontier putting down wyvern flocks anymore. It's the True Demon King's fault…both minian and wyvern numbers have dwindled, and now the habitats of both groups no longer brush up against each other.
Racing through the gaps between houses, they drove across a vacant plot of land at the dead end of one street and came out onto the road on the other side.
His driving may have been inept, but he was thoroughly familiar with every nook and cranny of Aureatia.
In order to defend their home soil from wyverns, he had first needed a complete grasp of the terrain. Not only to help his own men fight against them, but to properly evacuate the citizens away from those formidable foes in the sky.
All this extra effort, too, had been unnecessary.
Since Harghent had been appointed to his Sixth General seat, there hadn't been a single case of wyverns invading into Aureatia's domain.
Very rarely there were times a wyvern had broken away from their flock and approached Aureatia, but they would be shot down with the latest antiair cannons long before they ever reached the city.
My unnecessary ambitions and aspirations also ended up getting so many brilliant men of mine killed.
There wasn't a single commanding military officer who hadn't led their troops to their death in battle.
However, in Harghent's case, they had been completely meaningless deaths, all to serve his own personal ambition. He wondered what exactly he could do to make amends with the families of the deceased soldiers he had urged to their deaths in his campaign to subjugate Vikeon.
In the Lithia War, too, everything I did was unnecessary and uncalled for.
The Mage City soldiers that had worked under Harghent were all dead, too.
The fact that they had volunteered to invade Lithia themselves was no excuse.
They had died because Harghent was too incompetent to properly control the Mage City soldiers on the front lines. If it had been a real member of the Twenty-Nine Officials…anyone besides Harghent himself, they would have been able to make them abandon their foolish plan and wouldn't have caused the battle situation to deteriorate.
The wyvern handler girl Curte wouldn't have died, either.
The view of the city he caught through the gaps in the buildings was flickering red.
Aureatia was burning like Lithia was that day. The Eastern Outer Ward was close.
Why was Alus trying to burn Aureatia down?
Harghent even felt that if this was all out of hatred toward him, then he'd be fine throwing his life away that very second.
He was the one who'd ended up leading Lucnoca the Winter here.
If I hadn't brought her here, I never would have made young Lagrex fight like he did that day… I didn't deserve any gratitude at all. Why, back then, hadn't I been able to say that?
He had seen Alus fall from the skies of Mali Wastes.
Harghent tightly shut his eyes, as if to avert his gaze from the city wreathed in flames.
If I hadn't brought Lucnoca the Winter here…
He simply wished to see his lone wyvern friend fight and win against the truly mighty and strong.
This wish of Harghent's, more than anything else, had been the most unnecessary thing of all.
"…Sorry 'bout that, old man."
Soujirou had been sitting in silence next to him until he murmured, still looking out the window.
"What for?"
"You wanna kill Alus for good, right? I made you take that detour, and worst of all, we didn't even settle the score. I was just thinking for a sec…and sorta thought that you really did a good job driving through all of that, even though there wasn't nothing in it for you at all."
"…Ha, ha-ha-ha. I was just whipped up into a fervor… No, I was desperate. Seems like it's those moments when my strength alone isn't enough to do
anything when I end up getting that way."
It was the same when he fought Vikeon, back in Mage City, and when he encountered Lucnoca, too.
He had simply been able to do the same when faced with a hail of bullets from Mestelexil, too.
"Real brave, ain't ya?"
"…It's all unnecessary. Everything I do is unnecessary." The foolhardy courage he wasn't meant to overcome.
Achievements that went beyond his station. The words that didn't need to be said.
The friendship that killed his friend.
Harghent the Still's life was filled to the brim with unnecessary things.
I don't need to be here.
Despite knowing this better than anyone else, Harghent was heading to the battle.
"When it's all said and done, to the village, I'm an unneeded kid."
The sound of waves was always present in his memories from long ago.
The sound constantly echoed within the shack along the rock cliffs, seemingly on the verge of being gobbled up by the sea any minute.
"I've got three older brothers in my family, see, and I'm the most incompetent one, so everyone's always teasing me, saying it'd be better if Harghent was never born at all."
"What do you mean by unneeded?" "I mean I don't count for anything."
The young boy's name was Harghent. The name had been thoroughly drilled into his mind.
After colliding violently into the cliff wall, Alus had apparently been close to death on the reef directly below.
If Harghent didn't happen to be passing by that area by coincidence, he likely would have been dead by now. Alus was the weakest wyvern in his flock, so that had to be right.
"The way the guys in the village see it, three is the correct number of children for my family to have. Since I was born after them, on top of being totally useless, they say I'm unnecessary."
"Hmm… I'm jealous…" "Huhhh?!"
Harghent's voice grew ever so slightly louder.
Apparently minia let out this sort of cry when they're upset. This might have been just Harghent, though.
"Well, if three's the correct number in your village…then that means my arms are the correct number, too…"
"That's not what I'm trying to get at here!" Harghent did indeed seem to be in a bad mood.
Alus wished Harghent would enjoy himself just a bit more. If Harghent was in a better mood while he was with Alus, then Alus would've been able to observe what sort of faces and voices minia made when they were enjoying themselves.
"Listen. Your arms are unnecessary, too. Not just one of them or anything. They're all unnecessary. There aren't any other wyverns who have grown arms like that. If I had five arms, I'd look like a weird monster, too, right?"
"You think so…? That sounds pretty interesting to me…"
"Argh, enough! Can't you think about what you're actually saying before you talk?!"
Alus didn't think it was that bad to have more than the correct number of something. That was how he felt.
The wyvern flock that Alus was born into was always starving.
Buffeted by the cold salt air as they flew over the ocean, they ate rats, mice, even bugs and weeds, too.
The most important of the flock were always saying that if they increased the numbers of their flock high enough, they would eventually be able to feed on minia in the nearby settlements, but there were no previous examples of them doing so.
Regnejee, a little bit older than Alus, was smart, and he would often talk about how inefficient the current assignment of roles within the flock was or what he would be able to do in order to improve the situation.
Though at the time Alus hadn't fully understood what the word inefficient or improve meant and was first able to comprehend them after Harghent taught them to him.
Harghent was always in a bad mood, but unlike Regnejee, he would teach Alus the meanings of any words he didn't understand. More than anything, though, the stuff he talked about was better. What he talked to Alus about almost
every day didn't concern some hard-to-understand logic or structures, but it was related to simple topics like how much dissatisfaction he had in his current lot in life or how spectacular he would become in the future to get back at everyone who looked down on him. They were all easy to understand, even with Alus's lack of smarts.
"Sure, I'll admit I'm bad at counting money or remembering what people tell me. But just because I don't laugh along with everyone else when someone makes a lame joke at the village assembly, that's supposed to mean I'm an idiot?! I was the one who found the better place to set up our wyvern lookout tower, and then when the huge rains from before caused water to overflow the levees, I was the first one in the village to notice, dammit! In reality, I deserve praise! I'm the one protecting the village the most here!" said Harghent.
"Wow… You're amazing, huh, Harghent…"
The actual facts of the matter were that, without a place to belong in the village, Harghent would often walk around the seashore and had simply learned to recognize the coastline terrain or emergency situations nearby. In fact, Alus had been discovered on the reef along the same shore.
"…Stop saying things are amazing so readily like that. It makes me feel like I'm getting made fun of."
"But I said those things because I wanted to praise you, Harghent…"
"That's not it; you just don't get it! It doesn't make me happy at all to get complimented by a wyvern like you! What I want is more like…I want to hear it from everyone! I want to be acknowledged, and praised, by a lot of people, more than just the other villagers, and I want to be called a champion!"
Harghent had said the word champion several times before.
This was apparently a title on par with rare and valuable treasures, very difficult to obtain, and which any person, not just Harghent, wished to be called at some point.
"…What do you need to do to become one?"
"I told you, didn't I? I'm going kill wyverns. I'll expel them from minian settlements and make sure everyone can live peacefully. The kingdom's put out a reward for any skilled wyvern slayers. There are even guys that've killed tons of wyverns and risen up from being poor on the frontier to becoming a real general! Yeah, I might be awkward and clumsy, but…I've decided that, instead, I'm gonna focus on that and only that. Leave this village, work under a good bow instructor… and hunt down every single wyvern out there. Just watch."
"..."
At some point along the way, Harghent had stopped saying "the wyverns in this village" or "your buddies up there." Now he said he'd go outside the village and hunt the wyverns that threatened people.
Alus remembered being convinced that, since Harghent hated this village, and it would still be a long ways into the future before Alus's flock could attack humans, this would be a better alternative for him.
"Once I do that, I'll make absolutely every single person in the village bow their heads down to me. Suzy, Mashky, Takrekun, that asshole Pemeza, and all the people in the Ortega family, too! That Goorica laughed me the other day, too! That one's never even been outside the stupid village, so I'll blow their mind telling them about the amazing machines in the kingdom or bring back written books to show them."
"…What type of amazing machines?"
"Hell if I know, but they got something! It's a place I've never seen, so it's got stuff I've never seen, too!"
He did have a point, Alus thought.
Alus hadn't known anything beyond the area around this sea, but if he flew even farther out, there was sure to still be plenty of things he hadn't ever seen before.
—because he had never gone out there to see. "…I really do like…talking about that sorta stuff." "What are you talking about?"
"When you talk about becoming really important, and strong…beating up people you don't like, boasting about your treasure…I want to go along with you. I wonder if I could boast about stuff, too…"
"…Tch. No one ever says stuff like that to me," Harghent mumbled quietly, and faced in the opposite direction, away from Alus.
When he ended up like this, Alus could no longer tell what sort of expression Harghent was wearing.
Nevertheless, he got the vague feeling that Harghent was feeling lonesome. "I thought maybe, just maybe…there'd be another person out there that'd say
stuff like you do. I talked to a kid at Abeeq's metal hop, about three years old, the other day. About me becoming a general."
Alus could hear the quiet sound of a sniffling nose mixed in with the sounds of the ocean.
"Instead, now everyone thinks I'm even more of a fool. There was someone else listening in on the stupid stuff I was saying. Why does this always happen?
Stuff that I should be able to manage with just a little bit of extra attention, stuff I should be able to handle like everyone else with a bit of patience, I just can't ever do it. I'm trying real hard to do the same…just like everyone else does, but my faults always peek through somewhere. Always, without fail."
"..."
Alus remembered being told he had to become able to do the things he couldn't.
That he needed to grow up.
Harghent might have been raised hearing the same sorts of things his entire life, too.
"…Consider the source; take countermeasures."
"…I'm doing that. That's nothing…even I can…but the others just do it better…"
"Among wyverns…" Alus raised his head up.
"…there's almost no one…who says the sorts of things you do, Harghent. The strong ones don't think about anything. That's why, if you're planning on fighting wyverns…I think someday you'll end up growing stronger than them. If you just focus on hunting wyverns, you'll become more important than the villagers, and you'll be able to do anything, right…?"
"Ha, ha-ha… What the hell? Is that your attempt to cheer me up?"
"I want to do something to repay you…for everything you've taught me."
When Alus thought about it, the concept of repaying something itself was one he had learned from Harghent.
Did he need to repay him with something for teaching him about repaying other people?
Alus's mind nearly descended into confusion as he tried to think about it deeper, but meanwhile, the minian races lived their lives constantly going along with these difficult conversations. He found it impressive.
"Well, that sorta stuff isn't welcome, okay? I don't need your pity."
"Okay, then, if you don't need it, and it's not welcome…will you still teach me words or talk to me about minian stuff…even after my wound's all healed?"
"Of course not."
Harghent gazed out at the dark sea beneath the cloudy sky.
The small avian silhouettes flying around the cliff wall were wyverns.
Despite walking around the seashore, Harghent had never headed in that direction.
Because he was a minia.
"…I mean, us minia and wyverns are natural enemies and all."
At that moment, the half-destroyed automobile had slipped into the second borough of the Eastern Outer Ward.
With a single word, the conflagration covering the city had disappeared without a trace.
In the air, numerous rays of light coalesced, trying to destroy Alus.
Alus the Star Runner had transformed into an invincible being and was about to fly off into the sky.
The hero candidates, and possibly a powerless old general, were assembling and approaching the conclusion.
The sun was finally beginning to set on Aureatia's long, long day.