Zero

Overview

Zero is the butler of the Tower household and serves Shun Sato. The prologue’s account of Satomi’s flight identifies an old butler at the Tower gates who admits her and her royal knight inside, establishing Zero’s role as the figure who mediates entry into the isolated domain.

Within the family, Mimi calls him Uncle Zero. This small detail places him close to the household rather than simply in formal service. Volume I does not yet reveal his wider history or abilities, but his position at the gate makes him part of every boundary between the Tower and the outside world.

Connections

Zero serves Shun, is addressed familiarly by Mimi, and is associated with the shelter given to Satomi during the Hikari Civil War. His role is therefore entwined with both the Tower’s domestic life and its political secrecy.

Warden of the threshold

Chapter 20 shows how the Tower's perimeter actually works. When a royal emissary and four armoured knights step past the treeline of the Dark Forest of Eterna, the lead guard's first footfall trips something: an eerie sensation of crossing an unseen threshold, followed by a faint pulse of raw mana sweeping past the party like a cold breeze. Nothing else happens. Then Zero is simply standing behind them, an old man who had not been there a heartbeat earlier, draped in a pristine tailcoat.

He introduces himself only as a butler in the service of the Lord of the Tower, and tells them the Tower is closed to all outsiders at present. When the emissary insists on delivering Queen Satomi Hikari's message in person, Zero's eyes narrow and he answers that the man will return to his lady empty-handed — “if you return at all.” The emissary breaks immediately and sends a subordinate forward with the sealed scroll. Zero accepts it with a graceful nod, thanks him, and instructs all five to leave the forest at once.

The episode establishes that he does not need his master's authority to turn a crown's embassy back at the border, and that he chooses on his own initiative to accept the letter — because, as he later tells Shun, it comes directly from Lady Satomi.

The Harbinger of Ill Omens

The guards recognise him before he gives a name. The chapter records their recollection as tavern lore: stories of an enigmatic phantom who delivered a final warning to the foolish king of Lindsey before that kingdom was erased from the map. The title the stories attach to him is **the Harbinger of Ill Omens**.

This is the first time the published story connects Zero to the elderly messenger dressed as a butler who warned Victor the Third away from Eterna during the First Transgression. The guards' reaction is not respect but terror: they stumble back, whimpering, the colour draining from their faces.

Abilities

Chapter 20 demonstrates three capabilities directly. Zero appears behind an intruding party within moments of the perimeter being crossed. He travels by shadow — once the emissaries are out of sight, pools of darkness writhe up from the earth and swirl over him like black silk, and a second later he is gone, opening his eyes before the Tower's iron gates. And he speaks to Shun Sato telepathically across the realm, cutting into his master's thoughts at the royal ball to report that the Cavalry has arrived, while Shun sees the approaching column through Zero's own weary eyes.

Insolence in service

Zero delivers Satomi's letter by tossing the sealed parchment into his master's hammock. Asked why he accepted a message from humans at all, he answers without hesitation that he had grown weary of watching his master wallow in self-pity — and then, more gently, that Shun once told him abandoning the woman he loved was a mistake he had regretted every day since. “What kind of butler would I be,” he adds, “if I allowed my master to repeat his greatest mistake?”

The exchange is the chapter's clearest statement of what Zero is to the household. He provokes Shun deliberately, absorbs the rebuke — Shun tells him he will not tolerate his insolence — and bows deeply to hide a satisfied smirk. It also establishes that he has served Shun long enough to be the keeper of his oldest regret.

When Shun says quietly that they will come for him, Zero straightens and answers that he will be standing at the gates, ready to receive them. He is at the portal chamber beneath the Tower when Akiyama Magnus and the Royal Knights begin their approach.

Description

He is an old man, balding, with a thick and well-groomed moustache. He wears a pristine tailcoat with a bowtie and white gloves, adjusting them and straightening his lapels as a matter of habit, and carries what the narration calls an aura of immaculate poise.

At the portal

Zero is waiting with Shun in the stone chamber beneath the Tower when Akiyama Magnus and the Royal Knights arrive. After summoning Roku, Shun orders Zero to take the rest outside and guide them all home safely. Zero refuses without flinching — the narration calls him a soulless golem of eternal servitude — and says he will wait in the chamber until his master's safe return.

Shun steps into his space and demands to know why he must be so stubborn even at the edge of the grave. Zero's answer is five words: “Because She is never wrong.” It silences Shun completely, and the narration reads it not as defiance but as a reminder that the final page had already been written. Shun gives way.

An Ethos of a thousand years

The same exchange discloses more about Zero than any earlier chapter. The narration states that although he is this lord's butler, he had always served a higher master. It also describes the coldness of his stare as that of an Ethos who has lived for a thousand years — the first statement in the published story that Zero belongs to the same people as Mimi Sato. Who the “She” of his answer is, and what she has foreseen, are not disclosed at this boundary.