Chapter 58
Epilogue II.
The world Claude remembered was always tinged with blood and darkness.
Born without parents and raised as a hidden hound of the imperial family, he never had any other options in life.
The blood of his comrades, his enemies, and his own blood.
A life that began with blood and was destined to end with blood.
Cora Quieté. Also known as ‘Silent Hearts’, they were an organization created by the Crown Prince, who rose like a morning star in place of the incompetent Emperor.
They were one, yet many. Many, yet not together.
Claude did not know how many such shadowy figures the Crown Prince had.
Brothers who might have passed right by him without ever knowing, even under the same wings.
Cora Quieté operated on the principle of individual missions.
If you were to explain such a group to the citizens of the empire, there was a particular family that would naturally come to mind.
The Clausewitz family. It was a ducal house that started as the Emperor’s hands and feet, but eventually tried to seize the head itself.
Fed by time in the tolerance of history, the monster that had grown was now so bloated with ego that not even the imperial house could control it.
That was exactly what the Crown Prince was wary of.
* * *
Claude was eight years old when he first caught the eye of Duke Clausewitz and was adopted into the family. Naturally, this was on the Crown Prince’s orders.
Around that time, the Crown Prince, under the guise of charity, publicly gathered orphaned boys and girls, picked out those with usable talent, and put them through special training and mental conditioning.
Claude had wandered as an orphan until, at about five years old, he entered the Crown Prince’s orphanage.
Though it was only three years, that period—one third of his childhood—was enough time for the brainwashing to take root in Claude’s mind.
At the time, the Duke, troubled by succession issues, had gathered a total of five candidates, including Claude himself. Two years after starting life at the ducal house as a squire for the Black Bear Knights, Claude was the only one to survive.
Even he didn’t know how he managed to survive that hell.
He simply endured, over and over again, driven by the instinct not to die.
It wasn’t that he had a great attachment to life. What moved him was the goal, deeply rooted in his mind, that he must carry out the Crown Prince’s command.
‘Take control of Clausewitz. Bringing down that iron fortress is your reason and purpose for living.’
The Crown Prince worried constantly about whether Claude, sent alone into enemy territory at such a young age, might have his cover blown or betray him.
So, every time he made contact through an agent, he would remind Claude of the reason he was still alive and breathing.
Fortunately, the Duke was very pleased with Claude’s abilities, having survived the brutal years as a squire.
When he officially became the successor and began receiving the Duke’s tutelage, Claude had to endure a second round of brainwashing.
The Duke was not a compassionate master. He wanted to thoroughly train his heir to fit his tastes before passing down his seat.
Thus, Claude had to carry out the Duke’s harsh orders perfectly.
Even as he was exploited from both sides—the Crown Prince and the Duke—Claude didn’t even realize it was exploitation.
Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, he was born with a knack for harming others, so he survived by cutting down and stabbing those around him, as if parting a dense field of reeds.
His life had never been easy, but after becoming heir at the age of ten, Claude’s life rolled even more breathlessly into hell.
Killing, being killed, almost being killed, then killing again. A world of nothing but death.
Death was so prevalent that he could no longer distinguish whether this was the afterlife or the living world.
With so much death around him, was he really still alive? Could this truly be called living?
Was he simply born to take the lives of others? Then were all those he killed born just to die at his hands?
Did God send him to this world to serve as the grim reaper wearing a human face?
Of course, even such thoughts were a luxury in the face of survival instinct.
Claude rapidly lost his humanity. Forced to throw away things he never should have lost at far too young an age, he always felt as if he were floating a hand’s width above the ground as he breathed.
Until the day, in some village, he happened to come across a girl who was as good as dead.
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