Re:Zero Arc 10 Chapter 42: The Death Throes of the Milesta Dragonback Bridge

—The escape from Lugunica Royal Castle, after two whole months spent under house arrest.

The breakout had come close to sheer recklessness, but thanks to some unexpected help from outside, it was fair to say it had gone better than expected. Mind you, as far as the inside story went, they had possibly picked up some extra baggage, and there had been a scuffle that never needed to happen, so the good and the bad pretty much cancelled out. Anyway—

"Me, I just hitched a ride. Not like I've got any business bitching about how it went."

That was how Felt currently saw herself: one of the group that had escaped the castle, and, by her own reckoning, the one who'd done the least to make it happen. The real work of getting out of the castle where they'd been confined had been done by Ram, who'd been secretly coordinating with Marcos, captain of the Royal Guard, and by Filore, who had gone rogue, of all things, and come charging in to rescue Felt and the others. Plus her minder, Heinkel, if you were counting. Set down on a complicated board and split apart by position and duty, Felt's camp had been left in a state where none of them could play any part in the escape: not Felt, who'd done nothing but sit there captured, obviously, and not her knight Reinhard, and not even Old Man Rom, her strategist, or Rachins and the others. It galled Felt, how helpless her whole camp had been, but—

"But Ram told me that because we candidates were quietly doing as we were told, the people in the castle let their 'guard' down a bit. If it weren't for that, I don't think Mr. Heinkel would have been the only one who got hurt."

"Yes, exactly! I think so too! So, Felt, no more moping about with that gloomy face, let's look forward! Think of Emilia and me as your very own big sisters and lean on us. ...Yes! Think of us as your big sisters!"

With the two of them, who'd been in roughly the same spot as Felt, carrying on like that, her urge to sulk got blown clean away. Filore's nonsense aside, moping because things had gone well but she herself hadn't been any use was a regret way too luxurious to afford. Luxury was the enemy. For better or worse, luxury put extra fat on your heart and your body.

—Going through that shift of feeling along the way, Felt and the others had made it out of the castle, and then straight on out of the capital as well. The quick, decisive push had paid off: through the castle gates and lost in the crowds of the city before anyone found out the Royal Selection candidates were gone. The original plan had been to get through the gates with help from a gate guard Marcos had lined up, but in the end they'd done it by using a medicine transport that Heinkel had arranged on his own.

"Even if the guy doesn't know what's going on, once it gets out a soldier was involved, odds are they'll come down hard on him. Somebody from outside the castle can just say he got threatened."

That suggestion had come from Heinkel, battered and half-dead. He had a point, but it also seemed like he just wanted someone to patch him up after getting half killed. Since they had in fact made it out of the capital, that was only Felt taking it out on him: venting the frustration of having had no choice but to leave Reinhard behind in the castle. At Felt's tangled feelings, Emilia knitted her ridiculously well-shaped brows.

"You're worried about Reinhard, aren't you?"

"...Who knows. Not so much worried about the guy, more like worried about whatever the hell he might pull, maybe. Unlike Big Bro, he doesn't break easy, so he'll take care of himself fine."

"Hehe, then we're worried about the same thing."

"The same? Me and Big Sis Emilia?"

"Mm-hm. I'm sure Subaru's out there alive and kicking too. But no matter how many times I tell him, he just won't stop pushing himself and doing reckless things, and that's what I'm super worried about."

Emilia smiled as if to say, "See? The same, right?", and Felt twisted her lips. What made her itch was that she couldn't call it completely off the mark. For all appearances, Emilia actually saw things pretty clearly. And Felt was no good at having that told to her so straight. If this hadn't been about Reinhard, she could have dodged it a little better—

"That idiot. However long it goes on, he never settles into any one shape in my head..."

He might be the strongest being in the kingdom, praised to the skies as the "Knight Among Knights," but if you asked Felt, Reinhard was a giant idiot who didn't know the world, let alone himself. With all that power of his, he couldn't hold on to one big, solid, unshakable core, so his head wobbled this way and that and never settled down. Which was why, every single time, Felt had to be the one to slap him on the back.

"—"

That far into the thought, Felt glanced at the door to the back room. They were a few hours out of the capital, in a hideout tucked into the woods well off the highway. After slipping out of the city in the aforementioned medicine transport, the group had switched to a dragon carriage and, once they reached this hideout, decided to spend the night here. In the back room, Filore was now doing her utmost to treat the badly wounded Heinkel.

"Strictly speaking, it isn't proper to use Sacraments without the Church's permission, but I had a thought. If I go the route of getting approval after the fact, I can use them as much as I please... I mean, using Sacraments as the need arises might also be the will of the 'Divine Dragon,' don't you think...!"

Whether Filore, fist clenched in resolve, could get away with that as a "Saint" was another matter. Still, Felt had no business saying anything about it. She'd never so much as brushed up against the doctrine of the "Church of the Divine Dragon," and she wasn't confident she could judge fairly where Heinkel was concerned. If anything, there was something about Reinhard she wanted to check with Heinkel once he could talk, but that was about it. So whatever answer Filore brought back from behind that door, where she kept letting out cries of "Hyah!" and "Nnngh!", Felt's plan for now was to sit back and watch.

"For better or worse, Lady Filore and Heinkel's move served as a smokescreen. The arrangements for getting through the castle gate were theirs, while this hideout is one I prepared... With the sources mixed like that, it should throw off our pursuers."

"Thank goodness. That's all thanks to Filore and the others coming. But, Marcos, I still think beating Heinkel to a pulp like that was..."

"...Given the circumstances, I would ask that you consider it unavoidable. Had it been anyone but him, I believe I would have shown more restraint."

"What, so it was some guy you can't stand and you got a little carried away?"

"I mean that I knew he was the sort of man who wouldn't stop unless I went that far. In fact, even after all that, he neither died nor so much as lost consciousness. Rotten or not, he is an Astrea. ...Though I suppose that hardly needed saying to you, Lady Felt."

"Tch. Walked right into that one."

With that, Felt clicked her tongue at Marcos, who had just come back from checking the area around the hideout. At the castle he'd worn a full suit of silver armor, but now that they were on the run he'd shed that conspicuous gear and changed into light clothes no different from any townsman's: plain clothes, at that, closer to what someone from the slums would wear. They suited him well enough, but a change of clothes couldn't hide his natural build or the pressure he gave off, so it did about as much good as a drop in the bucket. Still, the effort itself was proof that his cooperation wasn't a whim or a passing lapse of judgment.

"Rockface, where to from here?"

"I certainly have somewhere in mind, but will you be coming along?"

"Saying goodbye after coming this far's what wouldn't make sense. Besides, we're after the same thing, right? Pounding the crap outta the bastards trying to wreck the castle... no, the whole kingdom."

"Mm, that's right. Wrecking the country is Felt's campaign promise, after all. I remember perfectly well what you said that first time."

"Hearing it put like that makes it sound like I'm picking some godawful fight too."

Apparently Emilia had meant to back her up; at Felt's sour look, her eyes went round with an "Eh?" Then, at the exchange between the two of them, came the faint, hoarse sound of a breath escaping. Felt looked over and saw it was Marcos, the back of his hand pressed to his mouth, apparently stifling a laugh. Felt shot him a sullen look before she could stop herself, and he followed up with a "My apologies."

"The two of you were amusing, and I'm afraid it got the better of me. For rivals in the Royal Selection, you treat each other quite amicably."

"Yes, that's right! We're competing for the same throne, but we don't plan to spend the whole time glaring at each other all prickly. Right?"

"Ain't like there's some rule about it, but yeah, that's pretty much how it is. It's not like we hate each other's guts, so snapping and biting at each other'd just be stupid, right?"

Felt answered Emilia's peaceable take by adding some spice of her own. Hearing their answers, Marcos folded his thick arms and closed his eyes without a word. Like that, his presence was so still you could honestly mistake him for a lump of rock.

"...To be honest, when it became clear the Royal Selection could not be avoided, I braced myself. The candidates' struggle for the throne would shake the country badly; it might even split it apart. I spent my days asking myself what role we of the Royal Guard ought to play amid all that."

When the rock at last began to speak, its words were the heartfelt plea of someone who truly cared for the kingdom. And there was no doubt that not just Marcos, but the "Council of Sages" and everyone connected to the castle had fretted over it plenty. After all, a Royal Selection alone was unheard of, and the candidates it had gathered were oddities, every one of them, with Felt and Emilia the two biggest of the lot.

"You've got my sympathy. Hell of a time to be stuck as knight captain."

"I appreciate your concern. I do, however, take a different view."

"A different view? You mean...?"

"I believe the kingdom was fortunate that the Royal Selection candidates turned out to be all of you. Good, reasonable, honest people. Which is precisely why I cannot stop regretting that I failed to prevent this situation before it began."

"...Well, a kingdom one shove from toppling 'cause of a Sin Archbishop ain't exactly healthy."

Marcos's words were heavy with self-reproach, and halfway consolation would mean nothing to him. The inadequacy he felt was plain fact. If the knights were the sword that guarded the kingdom, then neither Marcos nor the knights under his command had done their job. But that—

"—We can't just keep letting them beat us like this. It's super frustrating."

"Ha! When I'm agreeing with Big Sis Emilia, that's when things get real scary."

"Huh, why?! If you think the same as me, Felt, that makes me feel super confident."

Emilia's eyes went wide at the unfairness of it, and Felt answered with a careless shrug. At that exchange, Marcos laughed again. Not quietly, this time. He opened his mouth and laughed out loud.

"Ha, hahahaha! Funny. You two are damn funny."

"Whoa, that surprised me."

"So that's the real you, huh, Rockface?"

At the two candidates' reactions, Marcos grinned, the urge to laugh still tugging at his mouth.

"Yeah, it is. Stiff and proper doesn't suit me. My authority as captain's probably frozen by now anyway... or if they moved fast, I've been sacked. Oh, and the respect's still there, mind you."

"Mm, I can feel that. And I think you seem a lot livelier like this, Marcos."

"Manners and etiquette are like a suit of armor. On the battlefields that need them, you wear them properly, and the rest of the time you take them off and set them aside. Provided, of course, that you would both permit it."

"You heard Big Sis Emilia's answer, right? I'm the type who talks easier that way too. All that respect was making me itch from the start."

Besides, from here on they needed to talk straight with each other. That meant it'd go smoother if he dropped the pointless formality. Hearing Felt and Emilia's answers, Marcos gave a deep nod.

"About those plans of mine. I've got one of the few contacts in this kingdom I can still trust right now. This hideout and our escape route out of the castle were both set up by them."

"You've got friends with some long arms. Fellow patriots worried about the kingdom's future, that it?"

"Won't deny it. You can think of them that way."

"—"

At Marcos's answer, Felt touched a fingertip to her snaggletooth and narrowed her eyes. Fellow patriots worried about the kingdom's future. She'd half-heard from Old Man Rom and Rachins that the kingdom had some kind of defensive organization besides the knights. Slums or not, Felt had been born and raised in the capital, and she'd always doubted anything like that really existed.

"Guess from the sound of it, it does."

If the knights were the guardians out in the open, then this outfit would be the Hidden Guardians, so to speak. Hidden Guardians who never surfaced in peacetime, and a situation bad enough that they needed their help. Sure enough, this wasn't just a crisis for the Royal Selection. The Kingdom of Lugunica itself was in the worst trouble it could be in.

"So the goal is to meet up with those people? Do you think they'd know where Subaru and the others are... everyone we can't reach?"

"It's likely. At the very least, far more likely than if we wandered around with no destination while pursuers wore us down."

"—Laying out the worst possibility to make the choice you want look better is a distasteful tactic, Sir Marcos."

That cold interjection came from Ram, who had walked in through a different door from the room where Filore and the others were. Staring Marcos down with her pale pink eyes, she continued,

"Lady Emilia will judge matters correctly without you resorting to such spiteful rhetoric. One would hope the captain of the Royal Guard, of all people, wouldn't stoop to such base tricks."

"Harsh. It's a trick I picked up from a bad old acquaintance... Roswaal taught it to me, actually."

"Any trick can be lovely or base, depending on who uses it."

"Um, Ram, I think that sounded super selfish... oh, but I'm happy you believe in me. Thank you."

Emilia had packed both carrot and stick into a single remark, and Ram gave a slight bow. "Not at all." Then, leaving the wryly smiling Marcos to himself, she turned to Emilia and Felt.

"For now, the meal is ready. We can continue after dinner."

"Really? Thank you. What's on the 'menu'?"

"Steamed potatoes."

"Hehe, of course. They're super lucky."

Hearing Ram's crisp answer, Emilia took it in high spirits. Felt had heard that during their two months of house arrest, Emilia had stubbornly insisted, "If I don't eat one of Ram's steamed potatoes once a day, I don't know what I'll do!" and in that way had managed to keep her personal maid at her side the whole time. Granted, there had been reasons for wanting Grassis kept with Reinhard, but it was a trick that would never have occurred to Felt in a million years, and when she heard about it, she'd had to take her hat off to her. Anyway—

"I've finished the sacrament treatment for now! I'm starving-starving-starving!"

Right on cue, as if she'd been timing it, Filore flung the door open and burst in, and so the first night of their flight from the capital wore on over dinner.

△▼△▼△▼△

—On the whole, the group settled its course without objection: they would follow Marcos's connections and aim to join up with the "Hidden Guardians."

Filore and Heinkel, having meant to get Felt and the others out from the start, had presumably had a plan of their own as well, but what they'd intended to do once out of the castle, and then out of the capital, was bold in the extreme.

"I meant to take Emilia and Felt and charge right into the Watergate City of Priestella! Then the three of us Royal Selection candidates would go ba-bam and rescue all the people waiting to be saved, and slap down an achievement even the castle couldn't say a word against, and I thought, wouldn't that just work...!"

It would have made a thrilling picture if it had come off, but unfortunately the meeting point with the Hidden Guardians was Milesta, a town in the east of the kingdom, in the exact opposite direction from Priestella. Still, short-sighted as it was, the plan of scaring the castle stiff with an achievement nobody could hush up wasn't half bad. Once they'd joined up with the Hidden Guardians, it might be worth trying if a chance came along. Felt wanted to do something about the damage in Priestella too, if anything could be done. If it made strategic sense on top of that, there was no reason not to consider it. Even so—

"Course, all that chicken-counting's gotta wait till we've turned over every card we're holding."

Luckily, through the second day and the third, no pursuers caught up with Felt and the others. That was thanks to help from the Hidden Guardians Marcos kept in contact with, and no doubt also to the Perception Inhibition robes he'd provided.

"I was only able to procure five, spares included, so Heinkel, who cannot walk unaided, will have to be hidden among the cargo. Not like he isn't baggage anyway."

So said Marcos, who did not let up on Heinkel one bit. Between his own natural toughness and Filore's dogged sacrament treatment, Heinkel had pulled through the danger. All he needed now was rest, but that was hard to come by on the run. For the moment, once they reached Milesta without incident, the worries Felt and the others carried, and Heinkel's condition too, would come out of the fog—or so it should have gone.

—If only their pursuers hadn't caught them on the Milesta Dragonback Bridge, with their destination right before their eyes.

△▼△▼△▼△

Construction of the Milesta Dragonback Bridge is said to have begun some three hundred years ago.

Milesta Gorge, which cuts across the highway leading to the capital, was once a notorious obstacle and a headache for travelers. To reach the far side, one had to descend to the bottom of the gorge and take a ferry, mindful of the river's moods, or else spend days detouring upstream. To put an end to that inconvenience, the kingdom set about building a great bridge to link the two sides of the gorge.

The work took fully twenty years. The finished bridge was five hundred meters long and stood more than a hundred meters above the water, and supported by numerous thick piers built up from the riverbed, it carried a broad road that did not shake even under the traffic of dragon carriages. In the mornings, when the river mist filled the gorge and hid the piers, only the road surface showed above the mist, rising gently toward the center, and this was said to look like a giant dragon lying stretched across the gorge. Even before it was finished, those who worked on it had fondly taken to calling it the "Dragon's Back."

And so the great bridge came to be known as the Milesta Dragonback Bridge. To make the name official, carvings of a dragon's head and tail were set at either end, and it came to be said that touching the nose of the dragon facing the capital was a prayer for safe travels.

Two hundred and eighty years had passed since it opened. Its road, worn down by wheels, had been relaid again and again, and new stones had been fitted into its chipped railings, while the Dragon's Back kept its unchanging majesty and the people's affection. Even after those who built the bridge, and their children and grandchildren, had left this world, the stacked stones had faithfully carried out their duty, bearing the people of later ages to the far shore.

—And now, that Milesta Dragonback Bridge was on the verge of crumbling away.

△▼△▼△▼△

"—"

There were roughly fifty dragon carriages on the bridge. Counting the merchant wagons piled high with cargo, the passenger carriages crammed with travellers and the people on foot weaving between them, those crossing numbered well over a thousand. Every one of them had been pinned in place by the death throes that had suddenly risen from the Dragonback Bridge.

The great fissure had opened in the road without warning, and in an instant its cracks branched out like lightning, swallowing the wheels of the carriages in the column without mercy and stopping them dead. When the carriages in front stopped, those behind had no choice but to haul on their reins in a panic, and the ground dragons, trying to avoid collisions, dragged their carriages askew, the impact making the iron railings that lined both sides of the bridge groan. All the while, the sound of the Dragonback Bridge breaking apart and the violent shaking battered the hearts of everyone on it, and people jostled and shoved between the carriages as the chaos spread. Just when it seemed that, at this rate—

"—Icicle Line!"

A voice rang out, high, clear and beautiful, and painted over the bridge's death throes with a different sound. What echoed out now was the fragile crackle of air freezing solid. It was a guiding hand of absolute ice, sealing one by one the mouths to the abyss that the tremors had torn open in the Dragonback Bridge and binding the bridge back together by force—

"Honestly! Doing something this awful just to find us...!"

As the mist-laden wind turned frigid and sent grains of ice rolling across the bridge, a beautiful girl with long silver hair dancing around her—Emilia—narrowed her almond-shaped eyes, her anger plain to see. And then—

"I won't let you! I'm super angry, you know!"

She held out her hand, and the great fissure that should have brought down the Milesta Dragonback Bridge was sealed. Freezing it shut, like icing over a bleeding wound, was a crude method, but in this situation it was the best answer for protecting well over a thousand lives. In moments that called for pure instinct, how reassuring her unhesitating drive was.

"Hey, anyone who can move, don't stop! Leave your stuff! Your life's worth more!"

Leaning on that reassurance, Felt got her own legs moving too. She leapt onto the roof of a tilting dragon carriage and squinted toward the back of the column as she shouted. The great crack across the middle of the bridge had been sealed with ice, but that didn't mean the carriages whose wheels had dropped into it could climb back out. Axles snapped under the strain, and ground dragons dragged down with their sinking carriages let out desperate cries. However hard the drivers worked the reins from their seats, it was a pit there was no getting out of—

"Damn it, if it's come to this, I'll..."

"—Lady Felt, stay here."

Just before she could bend her knees and spring, a tremendous weight launched forward, leaving the low voice behind. It was a boulder tearing along at terrific speed, stamping footprints into the surface of the bridge—no, it was Marcos. He latched onto a carriage being swallowed by the hole, seized the leather straps that joined ground dragon to carriage, and with strength no human should have, twisted them and ripped them apart. Suddenly freed from the weight, the ground dragon stumbled forward, while Marcos's outstretched arm caught the steeply tilting carriage one-handed, wrenched its wheels out of the hole and set it back on the road. Felt caught her breath at that monstrous strength, but she left that side to Marcos and turned her eyes elsewhere—

"—!?"

The violent jolt that came next slammed Felt down against the carriage roof. A strangled "Kh" was squeezed from the back of her throat. Forcing her watering eyes open, she looked around to see what had happened, and a cold wind that stung her skin swept over her whole body. It was a wind full of white spray, and only when she realised the spray was shattered grains of ice did she understand: countless cracks had spread like a spiderweb through the white ice that had halted the bridge's collapse and become its new lifeline.

"Wh-what just..."

...happened, she meant to murmur, but the words never got that far. Before they could, the masses of ice that had wrapped around the railings crumbled, and the icy seams sealing the road all clouded white at once. The bridge let out a scream unlike the one before, though it led to the same end; the collapse that had been held back started again, and the Milesta Dragonback Bridge began to heave. As the noise and the shaking wrung Felt's insides—

"...I'll break it. Broken."

It was an utterly flat voice, half lost among the bridge's screams. Felt spun around, and there in her line of sight, on a broken section of railing beyond the line of carriages, stood a slender figure. It was a gloomy-faced woman with wavy green hair and skin as pale as an invalid's. She stood motionless on the railing, an unusual gauntlet on her left hand, and even from a distance Felt could see white grains spilling from its fingertips and scattering into Milesta Gorge. —They looked like grains of ice. Felt had no idea what it meant, but she was certain of one thing.

—That woman was the one trying to shatter the Milesta Dragonback Bridge.

"Maid! It's that woman!!"

With that certainty searing her back, Felt pointed at the green-haired woman as she shouted. The one who moved at once in response was Ram, who held the reins on the dragon carriage's driver's seat. The instant she saw who Felt was pointing at, she asked for no explanation at all. She simply drew her staff in one swift motion and leveled its tip at the target,

"El Fura!"

The blade of wind she loosed flew smoothly over the chaos churning across the bridge, tracing a masterful arc. A second-rate caster's attack would have caught any number of bystanders along the way, but this one flew true, slipping past every obstacle as it bore down on its target. It seemed certain the wind blade would mercilessly take the woman's slender head from her shoulders. Then the blade burst apart like struck water, scattered, and was gone.

"Broken."

The woman murmured it as she leaned where she stood on the railing, rubbing together the fingertips she had raised. It made no sense. But there was no time to demand what it meant. Her attack had been stopped somehow, yet Ram still readied herself to unleash a second wave, then a third, one after another. But—

"—Down there! Somebody, look down there!"

The urgent voice belonged to Filore, who had tumbled down from the carriage. She had jumped out of the cargo bed to kneel beside a boy crying on the road, and now she was pointing past the broken railing, desperately pleading with everyone around her. Felt's gaze darted to where the finger pointed, and she understood what Filore was shouting about.

Far below the bridge, on the distant surface of the river, a huge white shape was drifting.

"Is that a ship...?!"

It was so big that at first she'd thought a mansion or something had come loose and was floating downriver. It was a rather luxurious vessel with two tiers of cabins stacked one on the other, and its open deck and window-lined passageways were packed to capacity; she could tell it was sailing with people crammed aboard shoulder to shoulder. The river mist kept her from making out the whole of it, but judging the ship's full size from what little she'd glimpsed, it had to be carrying several hundred passengers as well. And that ship was about to pass directly beneath the Dragonback Bridge, just as the bridge was on the verge of falling.

"—No!!"

The high cry came from Emilia, who had seen the same thing as Felt. She had cried out because the sheet of ice she'd spread to hold up the Dragonback Bridge had cracked and peeled away along with part of one of the piers supporting it, and the whole mass was plunging headlong toward the ship crossing the river. An instant before the chunk of rock fused with ice could crush the ship from above, an iron railing came hurtling in with ferocious force, struck it at an angle, and blew it apart in midair.

"Rockface...!"

It was Marcos who had done it, in the middle of pulling people out of an overturned dragon carriage on the bridge. He had seized a broken section of railing, wrenched it free by brute force, hefted the iron fence, which had to weigh several hundred kilograms, like a spear, and hurled it squarely into the falling rock. As a result, the rock shattered before it reached the ship, and the ship was spared from sinking. But the fragments raining down must have injured people. And more to the point, the crisis didn't end there.

Below, the ship was still under way, and the Milesta Dragonback Bridge was still falling apart. Neither had stopped.

"—Big Sis Emilia!" "I know!"

The bridge's intermittent screams dropped a step, turning lower and heavier. Her instincts told her this was the sound of a fatal collapse. Sure enough, without any great tremor, she felt the ground beneath her sink with an eerie slowness, and Felt saw the entire bridge begin to tilt.

"—"

Hands pressed to the ground, Emilia spread white ice outward from beneath her feet, binding the crumbling bridge together. As the white frost mist born of her vast mana swelled explosively, from the bottom of the gorge it might have looked like a giant flower of ice bursting up through the dragon's back and blooming. Knowing that the lives of everyone on the bridge, and on the ship crossing the river, depended on that ice flower, Felt spun on her heel, used the broken paving stones as a foothold, and kicked off into the air. From there she used the shoulders of the people around her and the edges of stranded dragon carriages as stepping stones, vaulting over the line of carriages blocking the way and closing fast on the green-haired woman who had caused all this.

The woman's raised hand still held a glittering lump: a shard of ice. In Felt's focused mind, some part of her brain that was thinking with an unnatural coldness urged her to cut off the woman's arm before those fingers could close all the way. Felt cleared the last dragon carriage and drew back the dagger she held in a reverse grip—and that was when it happened.

"—Huh?"

Suddenly, Felt's shadow vanished from the road. No, it hadn't vanished. A larger shadow had fallen over everything, and hers had nowhere left to go. At first she thought the darkness sweeping under her feet was a cloud. It was that big. But as the river mist streamed violently past and the canopies of the dragon carriages lined up on the bridge all flapped in the same direction, Felt saw that it was no cloud, but something far more plainly solid.

"Wha... huh?"

Felt looked up, and her mouth fell open. She forgot even to lower the knife she had drawn back. Even the woman she was fighting had stopped, fingers still pinching the ice, and was staring up at the same thing. Above the gorge, higher than the cliffs on either bank, looking down on the Dragon's Back, there was a castle. — There was a castle in the sky.

"—Am I dreaming?"

This was too much, and Felt couldn't help doubting her own eyes. But no matter how hard she doubted, it was there, unmistakably a castle. A fortress that ought to have had its roots sunk in the earth hung in the air with its underside bared, shouldering aside the mist that filled the gorge. As everyone caught their breath at a sight so far beyond anything they knew—

"—Subaru!!"

Emilia alone was looking not at the castle but at one spot on it as she cried out. The desperation of a moment before cleared from her wide violet eyes, and a light of joy spread through them instead. Felt followed her gaze and saw it too. — On a balcony jutting from the castle toward them, two figures stood close together. A girl in a dress, and a black-haired boy holding her in his arms—

"Let 'em have it, Beako!!" "—Ul Minya!!"

A spirited shout and a solemn incantation rang out together, and violet radiance filled the sky. Countless arrows of light poured from the balcony and struck the Dragonback Bridge like rain. Over people's heads, between the lines of carriages, into the tilting deck and the white ice barely holding it together, the arrows drove in one after another—and wherever the light pierced it, the bridge turned to violet crystal.

"—"

The tilt stopped, and something solid pushed back against the soles of Felt's feet. It was proof that the bridge deck, which should have sunk with nothing anyone could do, had held at the very last line. Then, a beat later, the people saw what had become of the Milesta Dragonback Bridge. It was—

"Jeez. Big Bro's as outrageous as ever."

Felt couldn't stop the words slipping out, half exasperated and half impressed. After all, what lay before them was a Milesta Dragonback Bridge changed beyond recognition. With the flying castle at its back, the ancient Dragonback Bridge that had stood proud for three hundred years had been replaced by an enormous violet crystal, showing off its new form as it glittered in the river mist.