The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 15

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Imperial Commander Returns Chapter 15

“Ugh!”

The corpse of a Barbarian Warrior.
The female knight who arrived before it suddenly let out a gasp.
It was because of the soldier kneeling in front of the Barbarian Warrior.

The insignia of a Decurion hung clearly on his chest.
Astonishingly, it was merely a Decurion who had slain the Barbarian Warrior!

Yet there was something even more startling than that.
It was the Decurion’s age.

‘So impossibly young!’

The conscription age for the Fior Kingdom began at fifteen.
Of course, those in poor health sometimes appeared smaller than their years, but this boy did not seem to be one of them.
He bore no signs of malnourishment, and his physical frame was perfectly balanced.
In other words, he was simply young.
Or perhaps possessed of an extraordinarily youthful appearance.

“Remarkable…….”

The female knight marveled as she reconstructed their combat in her mind.
A fierce battle where countless scars were carved into both bodies.
In the final moment, each delivered one last, desperate blow.
It was not one side that fell, but both.

The boy had surely wrung out everything within him.
After sending his companions ahead, he must have burned his very soul and clung to the beast with the relentless grip of a hound harrying a bear.
To hold on just a moment longer.
To drag out just a moment more time.
Then fortune must have favored the boy, while the Barbarian Warrior’s carelessness and depleted Mana had wrought this outcome.

“Salute!”

The female knight drew her Greatsword and planted it before her, observing a moment of silence.
Honoring the true valor of the boy hero who had saved his comrades but lost his own breath, remaining unbowed even in death!

“……?”

Yet strangely, her cheek began to twitch.
Wondering what it was, she opened her eyes and nearly dropped something that wasn’t there.
It was because of someone’s gaze.
The gaze of the boy she thought was dead!

“You……! You were alive?”
“My legs.”
“Hm?”
“My legs are killing me…….”

Thump.
“Boy!”

With that absurd remark, Delam collapsed.
The female knight hurried over and laid Delam out properly.
She patted his cheeks sharply, but he merely hung limp.
This time, he seemed to have lost consciousness entirely.

“This is…”

The female knight hesitated for a moment, then reached into her armor.
What her fingers found was the hard, smooth texture of a bottle.
The crimson liquid that gleamed within it was a precious Potion.

She uncapped it with her thumb and downed the contents in one go.
Then she pressed her lips against Delam’s.

Glug, glug, glug.

Delam drank it down with unmistakable hunger.
For someone unconscious, he was remarkably eager.

* * *

“Nngh… nnngh…”
“Ahh, ahhhh…”

Delam’s eyes snapped open.
He wanted to sleep longer, but the noise around him made it impossible.
From every direction came the sound of groaning.

“Ahhh… ahhhhh…”

But soon Delam found himself making similar sounds.
His entire body felt as though it were tearing apart.

It was no exaggeration.
Not his limbs, but something far deeper inside.
Some of the thin sinews beneath his skin had snapped, and a substantial portion of the channels that carried Mana—what was known as the Mana Road—had been severed.

It was catastrophic damage.
Another knight would have despaired on the spot.
After all, the Mana Road was the path through which Mana flowed.
If it was damaged, Mana wouldn’t move properly—
Which meant a decline in one’s Realm.

‘Recovery is going to take quite a while.’

Still, Delam forced himself not to show it.
Of course, merely surviving was luck enough.
But the real problem was something else: the place.

The smell that flooded his nostrils was of blood and pus.
A scent unique to the Medical Barracks.
The moans he heard all around him belonged to the wounded.

‘The cruelest place on the Battlefield.’

People often say combat is hellish.
But true hell unfolds after the fighting ends.
Soldiers with missing limbs. Arrows lodged in bodies, flesh carved by blades oozing with infection.

The only mercy was the presence of priests.
The priests of the Church of Light had worked tirelessly to heal them.
Yet twenty percent of those brought here die, and the remaining thirty percent leave with permanent disabilities.
And what of life after discharge?

‘The very bottom beneath the bottom.’

There’s much to say, but I’ll keep it brief.
The first thing Delam did after becoming Commander-in-Chief was to issue compensation to disabled veterans.
All the nobility opposed it, but when he heard of comrades who’d returned home as disabled veterans, he couldn’t turn away.

Even then, the fallen were excluded from the payments.
To give to all of them would bankrupt the kingdom’s treasury.

‘After all that fuss, grinding away lives to unify the continent… and for what? Lunch for demons.’

Delam found himself laughing softly at the thought.
Back then, he’d believed it was a necessary task.
That the world would improve.
He’d believed that sweeping away the royalty and nobility of every kingdom was at least work worth doing, if nothing else.

But thinking about it now, it was all nonsense.
Royalty and nobility were fundamentally no different from thugs.
No matter how much you swept them away, another one would appear from somewhere else and claim the throne for themselves.

Why hadn’t he seen it before the regression?
It was so obvious.
Had he been brainwashed?

‘No. I knew. I just chose to look away….’

Of course he had.
It meant denying his entire life.

In the end, there were only two ways to build a better world.
[Drag everyone down.]
[Or lift everyone up.]
And for that, he first had to unify the continent—

“Hah. This is actually fun.”

Was this how people got corrupted by the lust for power?
The thought struck him.

Now that he’d even experienced regression.
Royalty, nobility—he no longer cared about such things.

He was a Reincarnator.
One who’d clawed backward through time to correct his mistakes.
Whatever his intentions had been, he would finish what needed to be finished.
Prevent the war, gather the heroes….

‘And slaughter every last demon.’

That was all.
But lately, his thinking had begun to shift.
Or rather, doubts had crept in.

Was that really enough?
Would preventing the war mean all the heroes survived?
Would gathering those heroes let them stand against the demons?

‘And first of all… could those heroes even be gathered?’

The reason Delam had killed every last hero was simple enough.
Because he was the enemy.
And because they could never, ever be reconciled.

Heroes are beings who possess their own convictions and sense of justice, who believe their way is supreme, and who wield both strength and power.
Creatures more accustomed to collision than compromise.

Heroes like that.
Yet if war disappeared, could those monsters suddenly laugh together—ha-ha, ho-ho—join hands and fight demons in perfect harmony?
Was such a thing even possible?

That’s why it kept whispering.
The wild nature deep within Delam himself.
The incarnation of destruction, the demon of the battlefield……

“You’re awake.”

Then someone spoke to Delam.
A blunt voice that suited the battlefield.
And yet at the same time, a soprano that seemed utterly mismatched with it.

“Don’t get up. Your body’s still a wreck.”
“Ugh… yes.”

Delam, who had been struggling to raise his torso, soon gave up.
Instead, he turned only his head to look at the source of that voice.
There stood a female knight.

“You’re… Rubian Vistache?”
“You know me?”

Delam’s eyes widened.
Did she just ask if he knew her?

Of course he did.
How could he not—Delam himself had torn out her throat……

Lick.

Delam, tense, unconsciously licked his lips.

* * *

The Specter Blade, Rubian Vistache.
The eldest daughter of the Vistache Family, one of the kingdom’s great houses.
From childhood, she was famous for having an extraordinarily unyielding temperament.

Her initiation into the Knight Order was already the stuff of legend.
She had been betrothed through a political marriage, but apparently he had been unfaithful.
She beat him senseless with her own hands and then fled into the Knight Order, or so the story went.

Her skill was considerable too.
Relentless, hardworking—and possessed of a formidable talent with the blade.
In time to come, she would become the prized student of Sword Master Roel.

‘But that’s the problem.’

Had a belated adolescence caught up with her?
After Roel’s death, Rubian changed completely.
She suddenly joined the rebellion and began launching ambushes against the Imperial Army.
A senior knight once devoted to chivalry, now waging guerrilla warfare after discarding honor and everything else—the devastation was bound to be catastrophic.

In the end, Delam had taken matters into his own hands.
He’d dug a trap, waited, and disposed of the creature cleanly.
There had been no resistance, no struggle—just death. The memory left him feeling unsettled.
All that remained was bitterness toward the Emperor.

‘Well… it’s predictable enough. Back then, Roel had been nothing but loyal. Then he started attaching himself to the imperial princes, involving himself in the succession. The Emperor, smarting from the betrayal, probably had him assassinated. Something like that.’

Or perhaps Roel had been her lover.
Roel had certainly earned a name for himself as a man of sculpted beauty.
A woman might well lose her mind if a handsome lover died.

Of course, that was mere rumor.
Delam himself had heard Rubian’s final words.
What he’d felt in that moment wasn’t love, but profound reverence.

In any case, the conclusion was simple.
A female knight of some renown had appeared in the future.

‘Getting entangled with knights wasn’t in the plan—not yet.’

There were a disproportionate number of personality-broken individuals among the knights.
But then, wasn’t that what training did?
It was a series of processes: gathering mana while pondering how to kill more efficiently, drilling blade techniques, all of it in service to that single end.
For people like that to have good temperaments at all was the real oddity.

So he’d planned to wait as long as possible.
Build up his rank first, establish some distance and familiarity on his own terms.
That had been the plan… and now this, out of nowhere?

Still, the person he was facing was Rubian, legendary for her rigid formality.
Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.

Slick.

“Why are you licking your lips?”
“Ah, I’m nervous. Meeting you, Knight Commander.”
“There’s no other reason for it?”
“What other reason could there be?”
“You were actually awake then, perhaps?”
“At that time?”
“Hem. Never mind.”

Rubian gave an embarrassed cough.
Then she asked him several questions.
Most of them concerned his confrontation with the Barbarian Warrior, and Delam revealed only half his actual strength, keeping his account plausible and measured.
He explained that the Barbarian Warrior had been exhausted, that he was old and slow in his movements, that he’d never seen the axe glow brightly—
In short, the message amounted to: ‘I acquitted myself well enough, but that creature was so drained he couldn’t even draw on mana.’

‘She’s trying to verify my accomplishments.’

Adjusting one’s record of achievement was Delam’s specialty.
It was half the work of a commander, after all.

During the conversation, too, Delam gathered useful intelligence.
First: he’d been unconscious for a full three days.
Second: Mark and the soldiers under his command had all survived.

‘Thank goodness for that.’

The truth was, he’d made the soldiers flee first.
But not out of altruism.
After all, he was the one meant to protect humanity.
It made no sense to die in exchange for saving a handful of soldiers.

It was simply that they would have served no purpose.
Even if he’d used the soldiers as bait, escape would have been impossible anyway.
The Barbarian Warrior would have slaughtered them in an instant and pursued him regardless.

Fighting alongside them would have been no different.
If anything, they would only have hindered his focus — so the choice had been clear.

At least he’d sent them off with noble words to make it sound dignified.
But Rubian seemed to see it differently.

“Boy, I respect you.”
“Suddenly?”
“When a strong person faces a strong enemy, that is a contest—a challenge. But when the weak stand against the strong, that is courage. And when they do so for their comrades—”

Rubian placed a hand on Delam’s shoulder as she spoke.

“That is true Chivalry.”
“Ah… yes.”

Her flushed cheeks and burning eyes, blazing like flames.
Why did she look so naive to him?

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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