Humanity was a kind of lark, something that could be kept in a cage for appreciation and amusement.
How the bird lived, whether its wings were bound—those were not things the owner of the cage needed to care about. Perhaps all they cared about was whether the lark could still sing, all while smugly believing they had given it a way to live.
Because larks could not survive amid suffering, could they?
This was salvation. That was the idea behind it.
"What a lofty way of thinking. Starting solely from herself, arrogantly deciding everything without the slightest understanding—does that Lion King not understand the human heart?" Percival sat on a step, feeling a chill run down his spine.
By now, no one would think that Lion King was the Knight King anymore.
The Knight King had unquestionably been a wise ruler. Even at the end of her life, she had fought for her people, even at the cost of the kingdom's upper ranks collapsing.
Even though afterward, the Kingdom of Britain, having lost its king and nearly all of the Knights of the Round Table, immediately fell apart and descended into civil strife and war—
That island, that country, still belonged to humanity. It was humanity's homeland, rather than a place occupied by nonhumans such as Dragons and fairies. At Camlann, King Arthur and her knights had completely put an end to that possibility.
That—was the king who ended the Age of Gods.
A king like that could never do something as horrifying as Lion King.
Not only the Storm King and the other Knights of the Round Table, but even Liao Ye, Carmilla, Xuanzang, and Tawara Tōta fell into a nearly suffocating silence.
This could no longer be called merely a terrifying tyranny. It was something even more deranged.