The Imperial Supreme Commander Has Returned - Chapter 2

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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 Supreme Commander of the Empire Returns Chapter 2

[Regression]

It was nonsense he’d never heard of, let alone seen.
Wasn’t that just something salmon did?

So he’d never met anyone who claimed to have regressed, nor anyone who attempted it.
He’d never even seen a charlatan trying to swindle people with such a thing.
Even con artists must have thought it too ridiculous to use as material.

‘But I did it.’

For the first few days, even Delram—a man of legendary experience—couldn’t accept it.
It was simply too absurd for words.
He’d weathered every storm imaginable, but this transcended all of that.

Yet he couldn’t spend forever denying what had happened.
Everything he saw, heard, and felt was far too vivid.
Too real to dismiss as a dream, even for a moment.

‘…How did this happen?’

That was his first thought once acceptance came.
Death didn’t automatically mean regression, after all.
If it did, the world would be teeming with regressors by now.

The most likely candidate was the Cardinal he’d seen last.
When the battle ended, that old man had been the only living soul remaining.
Just before death, he’d glimpsed something—a brilliance almost blinding.
A Cardinal of the Radiance Church, no less. The pieces fit.

‘If it’s true… Cardinal, you are a demon.’

It would be extraordinarily cruel, if so.
He’d spent his entire life as the Supreme Commander of the Empire, living on the battlefield.
And now, just as he was finally trying to rest, he’d been cast back into the past?
No demon could be more vicious than this old man.

The second emotion that seized him was remorse.
Remorse toward humanity.

Hadn’t the Cardinal said as much?
That Delram had slaughtered all the heroes, and mankind had fallen because of it.

There was truth in those words—more truth than he’d like to admit.
Emperor Leosachs II had hungered for continental conquest.
He had dreamed of a world where only the Fjord Empire existed.

And Delram had been the Emperor’s sharpest blade.
He had led the Imperial Army in invasion after invasion of the kingdoms.
Before his advance, there were only two paths.
Surrender, or resistance.

Surrender came rarely, if ever.
The heroes rose up defiantly, fighting for their homelands.
And Delam struck them down, one after another, as they came.
He had merely done his duty as the Supreme Commander of the Empire.

‘The demons didn’t attack until much later.’

By the time the Empire had finally unified the continent.
When humanity’s strength had been worn thin by countless wars.
The demons clawed their way through the opening.
They marshaled their demonic creatures and marched toward the Empire.

The military scraped together every soldier they had and fought back, but it wasn’t enough.
The real problem was the quality of the troops.
All the strong ones had died in the previous wars.
More precisely, Delram had killed them all.

The final battle came, somehow, one way or another.
But the outcome was what you’d expect—humanity’s defeat.
The human forces under Delram’s command were slaughtered by the demons.

‘What happened after that… I can guess well enough.’

Would the last of humanity have banded together to fight the demons?
Not a chance.
If that were possible, there wouldn’t have been a war in the first place.

Rebellions would have sprung up across the lands as the Empire weakened.
The demons were distant; the hated Empire was near.
Even Delram himself would have done the same.

‘And then they’d have been defeated one faction at a time by the demons.’

That would be the end of humanity.
Utter annihilation, clean and simple.
The survivors would probably be kept like livestock.

In any case, Delram bore considerable responsibility for it all.
The Cardinal’s words were right a hundred times over, a thousand times over.
So then, why did he do it back then?

‘Because I didn’t know. I had no idea the demons would invade!’

But now he knew.
And if he made the same mess knowing what he knew, he wasn’t just a fool.
He’d be vermin not worth living.

So Delram had to do something—anything.
Prevent the Heroes from dying, or warn of the future.
Or else kill the Heroes faster than before the Regression.

The problem was that all three options were monumentally difficult.
As a simple individual, nothing was possible no matter what he tried.

‘So first, I have to climb higher.’

He couldn’t become a commander-in-chief like before, but at least a high noble.
He had to gain enough standing in the kingdom to have a voice.
That way, people would listen to him.
Or else he could build his own faction independently.
.
There was just one small problem, though.
Delram was a country peasant from the Fjord Kingdom.
All he owned was potatoes and two sheep.

A high-ranking noble? A voice in matters of state?
No matter how he turned it over in his mind, there was only one path forward.

“So I’m meant to re-enlist…?”

Delram let out a hollow laugh.
Hadn’t that thoughtless neighbor’s son said it just a moment ago?
War was the common man’s golden chance to climb in the world.

Besides, Delram had spent his entire life in the military.
Though his body had grown young again, his strategy and tactics remained intact.
And a second stint in service—how much better might he do, knowing what lay ahead?

“If you’re going to make me re-enlist, you might as well send me back further in time.”

Delram muttered the complaint half to himself.
His mother had come to mind.

The mother he had longed for all his life.
Today marked three years since her death.
If only the Regression had taken him back a little further—

‘Still, it would have been hard to save her.’

If she had died in an accident, perhaps it would have been possible.
He could have prevented it.

But his mother’s illness had run deep from the start.
She had been born with a frail constitution.
She would collapse at the slightest provocation, cough up blood if she so much as moved.

When she became pregnant with Delram, everyone had worried, or so he’d been told.
Yet she pushed through the brink of death to bear him, and—
that act became the blow from which she never recovered.

In the end, there was only one way his mother could have lived.
Never to have borne Delram in the first place.

‘So no matter how far back I go… well.’

Delram smiled faintly and felt at the nape of his neck.
His fingers caught on a leather cord, and at its end, a single Locket.
His mother’s only keepsake.

In his previous life, he had lost this Locket during the war.
More precisely, a conscription officer had taken it and never returned it.
When he’d gone looking for it later, someone had already sold it off.

The Locket he’d never found again in all his years.
Only after turning back time itself did he finally hold it once more.

Click.

Delram pressed his thumb into the groove and opened the lid.
Inside lay a small portrait.
His mother’s face in her youth.

The first thing Delram had done upon Regressing.
It had been precisely this.
He had rushed to the Village Chief’s granddaughter, the girl with the finest hand for drawing in the whole Village, and begged her to paint his mother’s portrait.

That he hadn’t drawn it himself had nothing to do with a lack of skill.
Before his Regression, Delram had already crossed fifty by a considerable margin.
He was far older now than when his mother had passed away.

And the battlefields—how savage they had been.
The unfilial son had let those memories slip away from him entirely.
His mother’s eyes, her face, the shape of her features…….

‘Forgive me, Mother.’

Yet one thing remained vivid in his mind.
It was the light in his mother’s eyes.

As he’d said, his mother had been frail, barely strong enough to bear him, and he’d never known when she might be taken from him.
Because of this, her gaze was unlike that of most parents.
Less warm maternal affection than a crystallized golden resolve.

[I want to live one more day to watch over my child.]
[I want to teach one more thing before I die.]
[Essential knowledge for living life itself!]

That resolve…….
It was still embedded in Delram’s heart.

A flutter—
“Ah.”

Lost in thought, Delram reached out his arm.
He caught something falling from the Locket.

When he opened his palm, there was an ordinary Mystical Leaf.
The sort of verdant leaf scattered abundantly through any forest.

Delram hadn’t put it there himself.
It had been inside since he received it from his mother.
She had told him it came from her mother’s mother, and her mother before that.
A treasure passed down through many generations.

Yet it was no ordinary leaf.
For so many ages had passed over it.
Still, the leaf bore no withering, no tears, no damage.
It was fresh as if just plucked from a tree moments ago.

He breathed in deeply.

There was one more peculiarity: its fragrance.
As he drew breath, a cool, refreshing scent penetrated deep into his lungs.
It emanated from the leaf itself.

On his oath, he had never encountered such a scent before.
No medicinal herb, no forest had ever yielded anything like it.
It was as though the essence of nature itself had been distilled and concentrated.

-Hello there?
“……!?”

Suddenly, a voice reached his ears.
Without thinking, Delram bolted upright in bed.
But again, there was no one around him.

That was only natural.
The place where Delram now stood was a cramped small cabin.
If anyone had entered, he couldn’t have missed it.

“…Was that from outside?”

Delram leaned his head out the window and glanced around the surroundings.
As expected, only the wind howled fiercely—no sound of anyone nearby.
He was about to close it again when this time he heard a real voice.

“Delram, Delram!”

The urgent voice belonged to the grandmother from the cabin below.
Her knees were so bad she couldn’t even walk on rainy days.
Yet there she was, scrambling up the steep path.

That told him how urgent the matter was.
Delram hurried outside and asked.

“Grandmother, what’s wrong?”
“Delram, disaster! The conscription officers have arrived and they’re rounding up every able-bodied man in sight!”
“Already?”
“Already? You knew it was coming?”
“Well, I mean… the outside world’s been full of war talk lately. Our village is tucked away in a remote corner, so it’ll be later than most, but I’ve always figured they’d show up eventually.”
“You little fool! If you knew that, why are you still here? You should’ve packed your things and been ready to run by now!”

The grandmother’s voice erupted in exasperation.
But Delram asked, puzzled.

“Why? I’m only thirteen. The conscription takes men between fifteen and thirty-five, so they won’t drag me away.”
“Listen here, you’re already bigger than children your age. You’ve got no parents—if the conscription officer insists you look fifteen, who’s going to stop him?”
“Ah.”

Delram nodded in admiration at the realization.
So this was why the villagers said the children were raised by their grandmothers?
She certainly had the wisdom that came with age.

Only then did Delram’s memory become clear again.
The conscription officers visited the village twice.

Now—this first conscription—he was left behind in the village.
But two years later, when the conscription officers came again—
That was when his miserable life began.

‘That’s right. The Upper Neighbor!’

The Upper Neighbor was taken this time around.
And he never returned to the village again.
Later, when Delram became a captain, he searched everywhere he could, but the result was bitter.
All he found was a single document stamped with [Missing].

It meant he’d met a dog’s death somewhere.
As most conscripted soldiers did.

“Grandmother, let me go check on things first.”
“Run! Get out of here now!”
“If I’m caught running, the Village Chief will be punished. Your legs are bad enough—rest at our place. I’ll be back soon!”

Delram raced down the path at full speed.
It wasn’t too late!

* * *

The young men are gathered in front of the Chief’s House!

Miel’s voice rang out.
Fortunately, there was only one path from Delram’s home to the Chief’s House.
That meant the Upper Neighbor must have taken this same route.
If he ran hard, he could catch up in no time.

Sure enough, a familiar silhouette appeared ahead moments later.
The Upper Neighbor and his father—the same two who had fled while digging potatoes.
The Upper Neighbor must have heard footsteps, for he glanced back over his shoulder.

“What? Delram! Did you hear—wait, what?!”

The Upper Neighbor, who’d been greeting him cheerfully, went rigid.
It was a perfectly reasonable reaction.
Delram had launched his entire body into the air as he charged.

Crash!
“Oof!”

The Upper Neighbor tumbled across the ground.
Delram, falling with him, rolled right alongside him and pinned his body against his own.
Then, wrapping the Upper Neighbor’s legs tightly with both his hands and his lower body—
he twisted.

Crack!
“Aaaahhhhh!”

At the sharp cry of pain, Delram dusted off his hands cleanly.
That settled the reason for military exemption!

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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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