Lemiere pulled his neck in and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Your Majesty, can you truly not recognize me, Chancellor Lemiere?”

No matter how he pleaded, it did not reach Kyle in his hallucinatory state.

Kyle beat his enormous wings and spoke in a voice laced with hatred.

“No matter what excuse you make, the fact that you caused my mother’s death will never change.”

Only then did Lemiere understand that Kyle had mistaken him for the faction that had opposed his mother’s entry into the palace decades ago.

A suffocating helplessness pressed on his chest.

“Your Majesty, it is Lemiere. Your eternal ally.”

“……”

“I have stood by Your Majesty’s side since you were a boy of nine. How can you not know me?”

He cried out in grievance and lamented.

“……”

Lemiere squeezed his eyes shut, his face crumpling.

“One month before I found Your Majesty. I lost my son, who was the same age as Your Majesty, in a riding accident. I sent my own son away, but I wanted to protect Your Majesty at least…… and it comes to this in the end.”

“……”

“I know. Even I know. That Your Majesty is not in your right mind right now. Even so, I hope you will believe in the sincerity of my care for you.”

Lemiere murmured with tears in his eyes. He was half resigned.

The image of his wife weeping if he died was vivid before him.

But more than that, he felt a bitterness toward the lord he served, who could not recognize someone willing to give his life for him.

At that moment,

The grip of Kyle’s talons on Lemiere began to loosen.

‘Don’t tell me he’s lost consciousness.’

Lemiere looked up urgently.

“Your Majesty, you must wake up! Your Majesty!”

Lemiere grabbed hold of his ankle tightly so as not to fall.

Like a broken parachute, Kyle and Lemiere spun and lurched, plummeting at speed.

“Aaagh!”

Lemiere let out a cry.

But Kyle gave no response.

Lemiere’s vision spun dizzily at a terrible speed.

Even as they fell, Lemiere did not let go of Kyle’s ankle.

“oomph!”

Splash!

Cold water slammed into his entire body.

Lemiere sank beneath the surface and barely managed to open his eyes.

He thrashed his arms and legs with everything he had and swam up toward the surface.

“gasp!”

He looked around urgently and saw Kyle, wings spread, face submerged, unconscious in the water.

Lemiere hauled Kyle over his shoulder and swam frantically toward the bank.

Fortunately, Kyle had shrunk considerably from the eagle he had been earlier, down to roughly the size of a parrot.

“What has happened to you, Your Majesty……”

Lemiere reached the bank, his face contorted, and carefully laid the eagle down on the dirt.

He placed his wet palm on the eagle’s chest.

The heart was beating.

“Phew……”

Lemiere breathed out in relief.

He tilted his head from side to side to drain the water from his ears and shook the moisture from his soaked clothes.

Then he took out the magic pouch he had brought with him.

The magic pouch was an artifact that made anything placed inside it vanish transparently.

“Forgive me the rudeness of placing Your Majesty in this pouch.”

Lemiere carefully picked Kyle up and placed him inside the magic pouch.

Kyle disappeared from sight in an instant.

Lemiere cradled the magic pouch and set off toward the city where he could board a carriage.

He walked for a long while with a weary face, then murmured with a pained expression.

“It seems there is only one way to handle this.”

In the end, Lemiere paid a messenger to deliver a note to the commander of the Holy Knight Order containing a false reason for Kyle’s early withdrawal from the monster hunt.

It was an unavoidable last resort in the process of managing an unexpected situation.

*

When the five-hour ‘Monster Hunt’ came to an end, the participants gathered back at the foot of the mountain where they had first assembled.

Murmur murmur.

Warm sunlight filtered through rustling leaves, but for some reason the atmosphere was quite unsettled.

Kyle was nowhere to be seen even well past the designated time.

“His Majesty isn’t here. What could have happened?”

“Indeed. Could he have been harmed by a monster……”

“Surely not. The Sun God would protect him.”

At that moment, a man came running urgently from a distance.

The commander of the Holy Knight Order received the note from him, read it, and his expression hardened.

He quickly raised his horn.

Bwoh.

The sound of the great horn echoed across the mountainside.

Every tense gaze turned to the commander.

He cleared his throat and called out loudly.

“I will announce the winner of the Monster Hunt. In the Imperial Year 1272, the winner of the Monster Hunt is……”

“……”

“Duke Ethan Tsepeshu!”

A roar of cheers and thunderous applause erupted.

Clap clap clap.

“We knew you would do it again, Your Grace!”

The drums celebrating the victor shook the mountain.

Ethan stepped forward with composure and received the specially crafted trophy and a pouch filled with monster stones made for the winner of the ‘Monster Hunt.’

Another wave of congratulations poured toward him.

After receiving the prize, Ethan approached the Holy Knight Order commander with a look that wasn’t quite satisfied.

“Where is His Majesty?”

The commander let out a troubled sigh.

“His Majesty’s condition worsened during the Monster Hunt, and he has reportedly returned to Montewarre Castle.”

“Returned to the castle?”

Ethan let out a hollow breath and couldn’t close his mouth from the absurdity of it.

*

After that day, Kyle’s image plummeted even further.

It was inevitable.

It was all too easy to misread it as the emperor fleeing without a sense of responsibility from the ‘Monster Hunt,’ an event he should have approached with the conviction of a ruler.

It was Lemiere who was frantically busy trying to manage the fallout.

He stepped up to defend Kyle at every gathering with other nobles.

“His Majesty has been in poor health lately due to overwork. Even so, he pressed forward with the monster hunt for the safety of the Empire’s citizens…… and ultimately judged that protecting his own body was the greater act of service to the Empire. Is it not moving, that His Majesty loves his people more than his own honor?”

But every time, what came back was the cold stares and sneering of the nobility.

“Chancellor Lemiere must have been inside His Majesty’s head. Though I suppose it’s possible, since you’re the only one who can come and go from His Majesty’s chambers.”

“I’d love to be invited into that secretive space myself.”

Lemiere could only move his lips without a proper response to the nobles’ pointed barbs.

The next day, and the day after that, Kyle did not emerge from his private residence.

He couldn’t.

And since he hadn’t called for an imperial physician either, the excuse that he had withdrawn from the hunt due to a health issue was gradually losing credibility.

Everywhere Lemiere went, he could hear the voices of noble officials criticizing Kyle under the guise of concern.

Speculation ranged from the idea that an emperor whose strength was not what it once was had fled the monster hunt after fearing for his life, to theories that he had developed a mental disorder.

Kyle had become their entertainment.

It was only a matter of time before his image crashed through the floor and kept going.

The time had come for Kyle to stand before them himself.

Lemiere looked at Kyle, trapped in the body of an eagle and sleeping soundly in bed, and murmured with a pained expression.

“Your Majesty, you must wake up now.”