Side Story 1: Braver's Maxim
Gaze forwards, maintain an upright posture, do not allow your smile to fall, do not let your body falter, do not permit yourself to flinch, do not show any sign of weakness. Ignore the tiredness, the exhaustion in your bones, the weariness that assails your soul, the hole in your stoma– it is not there. There is no hole.
Control yourself.
My breath is even, my heart calm, my movements fluid, devoid of any hint that would reveal the vulnerability they hid, and I continued to recite what had basically become my mantra so many years ago.
Your image is your race's image, your failure will be perceived as their failure, your victory as their victory, your life shall pave the way to their future.
Your existence. Your true dreams. Your name. All were sacrificed in the search – no, in the creationof a better future. Of a future where we win back the pride of our people. Where we did not reach Level 6 despitebeing a pallum, but thank to it instead.
I let go of the reins I held over my mind and felt myself falling deeper and deeper as I went over the most recent events. My brain worked tirelessly trying to find a satisfactory answer to the conundrum I was faced with, fruit of the discoveries we made in the abyss.
After everything you've done, all you've sacrificed, everyone whose lives you have used and misused to pave your path into glory and renown. You are not allowed to give up now. Not this close.
Think.
Adapt.
Overcome.
Let the world before you fade, for your attention is not required there.
Walk the walk, talk the talk, smile, wave, there is nothing new in that.
Envision a new and yet familiar one instead. A world of pieces and lines, a world chockfull of phenomena, singularities, and the threads that connect them all.
Inside my mind the latest events played a performance unlike any other. In this trip that had been for nothing more than the simple accumulation of resources, to fund the true expedition that was to come, we had found evidence of Evillus activity. Moreover, unfortunate as it was, they showed signs that they were still being led by someone that unlike their name, was anything but stupid.
Use the gifts you were born with. Interweave the lines of the tapestry that carry on them this world's events, its players and their emotions, their actions and motives, their past and present, and use them to connect shards no other mortal could, in order to glimpse a mirror with a future that has not yet come to pass.
Thenceforth, use that knowledge to discover new lines, new shards, and from there unravel even moreknowledge, even moreinformation. Guesstimate things no other being could even fathom without the help of something akin to your mind and abilities.
Use that knowledge then to destroy and rebuild the mirror. Over and over and over again until the future it shows is a satisfactory one, instead of the total annihilation it usually shows.
Most importantly though, do not, under any circumstance, allow yourself to – allow herto -
"!"
I felt a small hit of something – pole, staff, butt of staff, butt of magical staff – on my knee, at exactly my seven thirty-seven. Riveria's location, my inner mind's map showed me.
Interiorly I sensed a part of me sighing, as if it already knew this would happen. The Hero of the Pallum race was once more put to rest and I felt myself becoming aware of what was going on around me again.
The sun shining high in the sky was perhaps the first thing I noticed. It's rays, reflecting upon our skin and embracing us in their splendor felt like the hug of a long-lost mother which I had almost forgotten about in the time I had spent without its company in the deep depths of the dungeon.
The distinct sound of gravel being crushed under my feet, the cheers from the populace, the raucous bunch behind me, those were the things that followed. Any other person would find themselves overwhelmed by the sudden influx of information, and it was only thanks to the training I had once imposed upon myself that I did not succumb to my instincts and react in a noticeably way to the sudden change in ambience.
As such, outwardly at least, I managed to continue as if nothing had happened. Inwardly my mind was also quick to overcome the shock and turn to the reason why all of this was occurring in the first place.
The hit I had felt on my leg was the motive. However, it was unlikely to have been noticed by anyone else. It had been nothing more than a graze to begin with, such that a common person would think it a simple mistake. Just a faltering hand that allowed the object it carried to slip slightly before immediately correcting it, such that most would not even consider the person who hit them – if they even noticed the action in the first place – to have done it intentionally.
I knew better. Every Level Four and above knew better. The only way someone that climbed two whole steps above the Fourth would let something as simple as a staff slide out of their hand was if it had been on purpose.
The only time where I would no longer be able to notice something like this would only come after I permanently left this plane. There was no possibility that someone who had received and survived the abyss's baptism more than three times would allow anything, no matter how simple or small, to go unnoticed if it managed to establish a connection with their bodies. If they did, then they would not have been allowed to enter the third stage on their path to divinity.
My eyes captured Riveria's lips moving and the two usual words leaving them.
"Control yourself."
In response I pursued my own in displeasure. Well, not in reality of course. There, my face stayed as it always did. That is, with whatever mask the situation I found myself in required.
"Our findings are certainly worrying in their implications, but they do not warrant Braver's constant wakefulness. It is simply idiotic to believe such a thing. You are this Familia's leader; your worries will become the… offspring's worries. They will cause them to worry too and they cannot afford to be at less than one hundred percent for what is to come."
Her mouth barely moved. Nevertheless, I was still able notice the particular way she pronounced the word the Deusdea had coined as the term the younger and/or weaker members of their respective Familia would be referred to as.
Captain, Vice-Captain and Executives, all of them and the rest of the Familia's members were commonly referred as their respective God's children. Intrinsically, just as the higher ranked held their own titles, the Gods had felt the need to have a name they could use to refer to the rest of their familia without including the aforementioned higher ranks.
To refer to those that were still not in their true spring, that had not yet reached their true potential. The ones that everyday strived to in the future receive the highest honor one could in a Familia, being declared its Executive, with all the powers and responsibilities that came with it. Or that perhaps would simply never manage to achieve it, that had hit the so-called Moirai's Block, and were fated to see their comrades surpass them and achieve heights they could only afford to dream of.
In other words, those that had not yet bloomed into the true forms they had the potential to reach, those that were still off the spring that would allow them to grow just as the Goddesses of Bounty allowed the earth's fauna to, were named offspring. Both to keep with the children theme the Gods so loved, and – probably the most important part really – because it was likely simply hilarious to them.
Truly, if there was one business no one could claim to be able to beat the Deusdea at, it was certainly at naming things.
It was maddening though, that if I did not make it painfully obvious, most adventurers would not think I was being sarcastic when I declared such. To this day I count myself lucky they had not simply settled on terming the group comprised of the Captain, Vice-Captain and Executives onspring and called it a day, for it sounded exactly like something they would do and that the children would immediately lap up.
Instead, they ended up calling us Springfull. Still a horrible name, like most things they decide to term – really, what in the Heavens is taxi supposed to mean and why are we naming carriages that way? – but at least it did not make me wince in embarrassment at the thought of it. Though, every single one of the offspring seemed to love and admire the label, and strived to someday be worthy of carrying it, so what do I know? Perhaps I am the one with the messed-up naming sense.
Still, due to Riveria's particular dislike for using the word, which was more than fair when one considered what it meant once it was calqued into her native language, one could argue she could have simply settled on referring to them as the Gods most often did. Yet I knew there was no way she would ever do that.
After all, among all the mortals walking behind me, I knew there was only one girl she wished to call child. Her child. Ironically enough, that one was also the only whose title of mortal did not fully apply to.
But putting aside the little cuteish quirks of how she pronounced certain words for a moment. It still amazed me sometimes, that no one looking at Riveria's mouth with less than their full attention would have even noticed it opening. Much less recognize the moves it made as the pronouncing of words.
The changes had felt natural for me as the years passed, and it had only been once Loki told me to concentrate my focus into the wings of the bird that hums, and to focus on counting the number of wing-beats it made in half a second, that I realized how far over a mortal I had come.
Of course, having the most highly enhanced vision among all the races certainly helped my case in that experiment, but I reckoned someone a mere Level above what I had been at the time would be capable of the same feat without difficulties. It was no wonder how the general populace simply did not seem to be able to form any relationships with adventurers beyond the purely professional or occasional flings of passion.
We were simply walking in two different planes of existence, almost as far as Gods were to the adventurers they watched over. Just like how the crocodile bird provided a service and received its fair share in return, yet lived constantly in fear that one day the crocodile may just think that the meal it provides is more appealing than the cleaning of its teeth, so did Orario's unblessed live in constant fear that one day the people that could break their spine with but a single finger would find it too bothersome to protect them and would forsake the unspoken deal that hung between the two parties.
Well, more than we already did anyways. For Orario, having a crocodile was far more important than the well-being of one of the almost innumerable birds that surrounded it after all.
Nevertheless, unchangeable facts of life aside, I could not help but return my focus to Riveria's words. With people holding a level almost as high as mine standing behind me it would be hard to transmit a sound that reached my ears yet did not find theirs as a consequence. That's why Riveria did not make any. In the end, no matter how high their Level or how accurate their senses, no one – not even an unchained Deusdea – could claim the ability to hear a sound that never existed to begin with.
Lip reading had been a hard to learn skill I admit, but it had on uncountable occasions proved itself to be worth the time investment.
However, without having overtly moved my head in the last few minutes, one would wonder how I had been capable of reading her lips. The answer was something I took pleasure in not telling Aiz and Tiona, so they would continue to be shocked when I seemed to be able to have entire conversations with Riveria without once looking at her face.
The hit on the knee had, in truth, been more than a simple callout. It was more than a simple straightforward poke meant to rouse me from my daydreams – for if she merely desired to do only that, a similar hit but higher on my leg would have done the work.
With a quick move, while masking it as putting up a show for the people, I relocated my spear, Fortia. The name a simple bastardization of the word the Gods had for strong and that had once upon a time been the name Loki had given the first spear she had gifted me. This one's number was well onto the double digits, yet to my Goddess's delight I had decided to keep the moniker.
In any other case, as was standard with any action I took, it would have probably been a ploy to either get her to favor me more or make sure she remembered my action fondly each and every time her gaze found my weapon.
Unfortunately, as I had learned very soon into my career as an adventurer, such things were simply useless on the one I called my Goddess, so it ended up being one of the few actions I had taken in this life without any special second intention attached.
Fortia twirled in the air, it's trajectory seemingly incomprehensible to the gobsmacked audience before finally falling after I had walked a few meders. I caught it with my right hand and after that, positioned it in a way that was parallel to my body and horizontal to the ground.
From there it was a matter of inclining its tip until it managed to reflect Riveria's lips and slanting its hilt no more than negative forty-five degrees to indicate that I was listening, before returning it to its previous state.
A normal mortal would feel flabbergasted if they were ever given the knowledge of what those seemingly empty and meaningless moves actually signified. That the full action, from Riveria's poke to the delivery of her message, which had all taken less than three seconds to perform in real time, actually possessed all that importance attached to it. Moreover, it had only taken that much time because I wanted to neither needlessly scare the crowd watching us, or alert the potential enemy agents that could be surveilling us. Which making my spear disappear from my shoulder and reappear seemingly instantly on my hand for no apparent reason would most likely give them reason to believe they had indeed been noticed.
Ordinary people would look at this and question the necessity of it all, believing the action pointless and far too overcomplicated for this era of peace we were supposedly living in.
They did not have to fight and adapt themselves to a war that lasted more than half a decade against an enemy that could be anyone, that could be anywhere, at any time and in any form, and that had no qualms about throwing themselves at you, a bomb attached to their chests, ready to give their lives for the cause. As if the senseless destruction craved by the Deusdea that had been born with a innate desire to see the world burn in the most varied ways needed something as simplistic as a cause of all things.
Still, had their intentions truly been to simply destroy Orario, giving no qualms about their potential entertainment – something I was thankful no Deusdea seemed able to do, as it at least made their somewhat erratic nature to some extent predictable in their unpredictableness – they would only need to use the Level 7 mage they had working for them.
The mage that was at the time able to cast faster than anyone in Orario, while at the same time being in the possession of a spell so powerful it was credited to have finished one of the three Great Calamities spawned by the dungeon. With a tool as powerful as that on their hands, all they would need to do was use her to employ what Loki had referred to as Blitzkrieg tactics when I explained to her my theory, in a game she liked to call 'Evillus, how mind-blowingly retarded can they be?'.
It gave origin to an impossible to pronounce acronym that Loki against all reason insisted on using, but I found it to be a fun game to accompany a glass of blue wine into the night. Sometimes I wondered how safe the people of Orario would feel if they knew their saviors spent whole nights devising more efficient ways in which all of them would have been exterminated.
That made me remember my friends inputs on it, and while unnaturally simple when compared to my other plans, I still believed my idea to be the most effective when compared to Gareth's, Riveria's or Loki's.
Appear, cast the spell, destroy a huge area of Orario, retreat into one of the countless unknown bases Evillus had at the time. Rinse and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, until Orario was nothing less than a smoldering crater. Whether the higher-level adventurers of the city died or not from the blasts… it did not matter. Once the population from which they bought the food they ate, the water they drank, the clothes they used, and everything else essential to their day to day lives, lay either dead or unable to provide any of those services, Evillus would have already won.
The crocodile bird would have gone extinct and thanks to that, the crocodiles' teeth would rot and fall, leaving behind a harmless predator, ripe for hunting.
Sometimes, the line that separated my genius from Valletta's felt too thin for my liking.
Still, Riveria's choice of laying waste to all the supply lines Orario possessed, using the power Evillus used to explode random homes with no real impact in the city's economy, was undoubtedly a good one. Yet it would take much more time to come into effect when compared to mine, and would end up with their own agents starving too.
Gareth's hit them till they die had its surprising merits. Considering how wrecked Orario was at the time, if they focused their attacks at key locations, it could have actually worked. Of course, that would require their Gods to start using their heads which made Gareth's plan invalid due to that impossibility.
Loki's… better not to speak of it. It made me remember that despite her goofy nature there was a reason most other Gods were completely terrified of her. Not surprising, considering the rumors about who exactly had committed the biggest number of deicides while in the Deusdea's so called Heaven…
It still surprised me that their fear ran so deep none of the deities who had once been Loki's victims and had come to the Lower World before her, making it so they had a familia stronger than ours, dared to retaliate against her for all she did as was commonly seen when a new God descended from the Heavens. Such was the fear Loki's years of terror had instilled onto their hearts they could not even fathom such a thought.
Nonetheless, even my plan was held together by a requirement that could perhaps not be met. There was, in the end, always the chance that the reason they had not employed any strategy resembling my own was that the mage herself had simply not consented to being used that way.
Something which would only further my theory that Alfia and Zard's objective had never truly been to lay waste to Orario. Alfia's end would make no sense otherwise.
Astraea's girls were powerful yes. Powerful in spirit, in will, in their absolute desire to make this world a better place even with all odds against them.
When compared to a Level 7 though? That kind of power meant nothing.
Terminal sickness or not, no person two whole Levels below their enemy could even do something as simple as follow their movements. Defeating such a person would be nothing more than a poor thought out joke. Yet those girls had been not two, not three, but four whole levels below her. One of them had even been five. Five.
The chances of them being able to overpower Alfia if she had actually been giving it her all were as high as mine should I challenge an unchained Poseidon to a contest of 'who can drown each other faster', while armed with nothing but a cup of water.
At the same time, by that point of view, I really should feel nothing but absolute gratefulness for Evillus. They had, in spite of everything, only ended up offering me a way to further my ambitions much faster than I could have ever possibly hoped in my most optimistic expectations.
After surpassing seemingly insurmountable odds, fighting and winning what looked like a war where victory did not seem to be attainable, that would have spelled the end of Orario as we know it if allowed to continue for much longer, and as such, the end of the world itself, I established myself as Orario's definitive Hero.
Needless to say, the contributions from the other Orarian factions must be considered too, for without them victory would not have been possible, but even those only ended helping me. Learning when to downplay my rival's achievements, and when to bolster them was a necessary skill I had to learn in order to walk this path, and the correct choice in this case was definitely to bolster them.
Considering that it was me who was seen to be leading them all, a part of the admiration given to everything they did was allotted to me. All that undermining their achievements would accomplish would not be significant when pitted against the blow my reputation would take for doing so.
That – and the correct way to attempt such plays – had been one of the many lessons I had ended up receiving from Riveria which no amount of book studying could replace. There were some things only someone fated to lead not a nation, not a group of nations, butan entire race no matter where they currently lived, was entitled to teach.
As I shifted my gaze up to the Heavens, and consequently to the eternal pillar that seemed almost able to reach them, Freya Familia and their impact came to mind. My opinion on them notwithstanding, they had truly been of irreplaceable help in the fight against Evil, and Ottar's Last Blow was hailed and embellished around every corner of the world.
Children of all ages, race and gender attempted daily to imitate it on the streets during their little plays after everything was over. The image that had been crafted for him was that of an unbeatable wall, someone that no mortal would be able to move, no matter their power.
A true King.
Furthermore, all of it happened without a single drop of intention to create such a situation.
Sometimes I felt like weeping when I remembered all the time and effort I devote just to make sure my image is kept immaculate and spreads as far as possible, only for that pig to achieve the same without even trying.
Trying to keep my thoughts off that can of worms which I had no intention of opening right now, my mind switches to the other major factions that had played a role during the Epoch of Evil.
Ganesha's Familia contribution, with their bravery and heavy sacrifices, were not to be understated. Neither was Hermes's, with Perseus items playing a key part in most plans I employed at the time. Curiously, their achievements ended up not spreading as far or as strongly as the others, which I suspected was most likely fruit of their own God's endless machinations.
And of course, no one could forget the Familia that ended up shouldering the harshest costs. Their end was as unfortunate as they come.
Yet there was one specific loss in that Familia that had ended up being harder to swallow than I had ever expected. To this day I felt like if I closed my eyes, I could still see her face. Laughing, loud and boisterously seemingly without a care in the world, although under that gaze lay a mind as sharp as mine. Given time to grow I did not doubt she could have ended up rivalling me and develop her own brand of guesstimation. I did not doubt she would have been able to wear down my walls and do what Tione had not managed to this day.
What I, in a shameful display of lack of control had allowed myself to do in order to cope, had been even harder to choke back the next morning. I still remembered Riveria's eyes when she found me passed out on the floor of my office, though I strove to forget the pity she held in them.
The display ended up being even more shameful when considering that the day I allotted myself for such things had only somewhat recently come to pass.
One day, where I allowed myself to simply remove all that was limiting me and came to terms with everything I had allowed to happen during that time-span. That I had not been able to wait until the next one spoke of the amount of stress I had been enduring during those hellish times. Not that it had been unexpected of course, such was the burden the one that wanted to hold the title of Hero during the Age of Gods had to carry.
No matter how much of a fake they actually were.
Be that as it may, even taking all of that into consideration, all the losses of life, of potential, of precious infrastructure, all the destruction Orario had suffered, and the bloodbath that had ensued. In the end, if it wasn't for exactly all those things, my legend would never have spread as far and as quickly as it had.
The name of the one that had led the entirety of Orario and had plotted the downfall of the largest conglomerate of Evil Gods to have ever appeared in the so-called City of Heroes had ended up known virtually everywhere. From the smallest village to the biggest empire, there was not one place that had not heard the name Finn Deimne. For the consequences that would come from the Evil's victory would have surely ended up with the world itself tumbling into a new Age of Calamity faster than an ill-prepared mortal fell from the Alv Mountains.
Furthermore, all of that bought at the low, low cost of simply losing the older members of my Familia – those that would no longer grow and as such had a diminished worth – when they decided to take a page out of the enemy's playbook and charged against our nemesis in a suicidal attack backed by the other older adventurers of Orario. All in order to stop Evillus' advance and give us, the new generation, a chance to put an end to those infernal times.
That and the fact that, as I said, most other Familias ended suffering far heavier casualties had somewhat crippled Orario's strength and its ability to police itself. Something that ended up creating a chain reaction which the more cunning Gods used to exploit the sudden power vacuum, which in turn made all the power conglomerate in a few specific familias. But that too served only to increase even more the awe people directed at me. Both for the role I played in ensuring such disputes would not end up with Orario even more destroyed than it already was, and for the fact I seemingly had not made moves to benefit from such.
Indeed, they had been all and more than I could ever had asked for.
Even so, I utterly despised every single one of them.
There was not one day where I did not curse my inability to do more, and to avoid even a small part of that horrible bloodshed.
One hour, one minute, one single second did not pass where I did not wish for Noir to come back and laugh at me, at what must seem like childish antics for one as old as him.
For Dain and his vulgar sense of humor to once again ring through the halls and make all elves look at him with murder in their eyes when Riveria turned out to be the butt of one of his jokes.
For Bara, to suddenly appear in front of me and declare her disappearance as simply another one of her pranks.
For little Jorg, for Rike, for Kent, Marvin, Yusuf, Qasaldi, Erzili, Yona, Lux, Marta, Price, Hellen, Torin, Elm – an endless number of names ran through my mind, unbidden and uncalled for, but not any less clear for it.
All the while I felt disgust at my own hypocrisy for thinking of them like that, while reaping all the benefits that came from their death.
My hand clenched around the shaft of my spear as I raised it high into the air to the clamor of the people. They were hard times yes, but I had managed to mostly come to terms with what had happened during them.
Even Orario itself seemed to want to forget as quickly as possible everything that had occurred during the Evil's Reign. Nations after a war were left broken and despairing, but thanks to the power of people that could topple those same nations in less than half a fortnight, Orario had ended up mostly as it was during the time of Zeus and Hera after a mere month of combined work.
The thoughts of what we would be able to do should Orario ever unite itself must surely make every foreign diplomat pray for that day to never come, for it would surely turn this city into a potency multiple tiers above what it was now.
Such would end up spelling the end of nations that still thought they held any amount of advance over us, like the Mage's Confederacy Realm – or, as it was more commonly known, Altene – and Rakia that somehow believed that if they still had their magic swords they could topple Orario, as if we couldn't cut the arms of all their soldiers before they had even began to swing said weapons.
In fact, someone that had not been present in this country-sized city but a scant few seven years ago would find it hard to believe that this street, from its road to the homes that bordered it, had once been full of nothing more than holes and bodies no one had the time to afford taking away. Yet now here it lay, with naught but a mark or two of what had transpired in it.
Even now I could still see them. Hanging from the windows, in the middle of the road, or thrusted from anus to mouth with a pike and left like that, in a macabre show of the kind of cruelty mortalkind could commit when it allowed all the limits society placed upon itself to simply fly loose.
Some would say it had been the influence of the Deusdea, and while that may hold a sliver of truth, they had fortunately not had any God able to use Charm among their ranks. Which meant all the actions that scum had taken had been made under a mostly clear mind.
I inwardly shook my head, showing no outwards sign of the kind of thoughts that haunted my mind. At the same time, I allowed my feet to continue to carry me forwards, the smile on my face never shifting while I shoved those reflections and their attached baggage into a little box called Intoxicating Day problems, and hoping against all odds they did not come out sooner than expected for a second time.
Right now, it wouldn't do to be at anything less than one hundred percent when it was I who had insisted we take the long way and walk this slowly so the masses would be able to see us. For despite living in the same city, the civilians and the adventurers could not be more clearly separated from each other. To such an extent that I did not doubt this was the first time some of this people actually put a name to a face – that was not drawn in a piece of paper that is – for most of us.
Of course, all of this held its clear benefits. It was thanks to these relatively small expeditions, to the shows, the acts that I managed to put up, with as much pomp and circumstance as I could get away with without having the public perceive me as an attention-whore, that despite having only three Level Sixes and less than a handful of Level Fives, I still managed to make the general population believe that Loki Familia's power in any way managed to equal Freya Familia's.
They, who possessed one of the only two Level Sevens currently alive in the entire world, while at the same time equaling our number of Level Sixes and Level Fives, and whose other members engaged in daily mortal combats to hone their skills in order to impress their Goddess, something that ended up making them more suited to fighting people rather than the monsters they were supposed to.
It seemed to be a rare act of fairness from the Heavens to me though, that made what Freya Familia had in power be compensated by what they lacked in brains.
…No. It would be great if that was the truth but it unfortunately was not. Falling for the propaganda I myself had created was beneath me. It was not that they lacked the brains, among their number they held one of the wisest kings to ever walk this planet after all, but that they simply lacked interest on how they were viewed by the general populace of Orario, only caring about the opinion of one single person and one single person alone.
My lips still twisted in displeasure at the thought that if not for Loki I could have fallen into that accursed Goddess's Familia, if it could even be called such that is. With all my desires forgotten, all my dreams forsaken, all my wants disregarded, would I even be able to consider the being that would stand among them to be myself?
I passed through a two-story house, with three blue stripes running along its wall, and knew that we were already past the halfway mark on our way home. For now, I was making good on my word to Riveria on not allowing what we discovered in the dungeon to affect me. Of course, what I was using to distract myself wasn't much better, and I felt I was quickly running out of material to distract myself.
We had barely walked 100 meders and I had already gone over the entire Epoch of Evil and other random facts of life. Such was the burden of people that could move faster than sound, and as such had to have a mind quick enough to process all the information given to it in such short amounts of time had to bear. The walk was far from over and I knew that any more and I would be going back to a time I wanted to remember even less.
There was also the fact that Riveria was sure to glare at me if she knew what I was… entertaining my mind with, but at least currently I was not –
White.
Thanks to instincts hardened by years of battle against a foe that – idiotic as it sounded – had literally made Evil part of their name, my sight would not allow any detail in front of me to escape, to be caught again by surprise attacks that I could have predicted. Which is why the moment I noticed the top of the signature Evillus hood among the crowd every nerve in my body flared up, every member stood at attention, ready to jump to action.
I felt Gareth tensing behind me, Riveria too, though like me neither was giving any visible sign of it. It was only fruit of multiple years shedding blood, tears and sweat alongside them that allowed me to sense things like that.
My body felt ready to take off at the slightest hint of an explosion and –
…it all ended once I saw the white thing I had mistaken for a hood, jumping up and down.
It had been hair. More specifically the white hair of a rubellite eyed boy that was jumping around, probably trying to get a better view of the famed Loki Familia. Never had I seen hair as white as his, nor believed it able to naturally exist in a boy so young, so it had taken me by surprise. My body untensed and I allowed myself a low chuckle to which the dwarf corresponded once he understood what happened.
From Riveria though, once again, I felt a small hit on my knee. This one significantly higher than the last, yet I still moved my spear so it reflected her lips once more. As expected, they were twitching in a way even a common person would notice if focused on them.
That pompous pixie thought this funny.
Moving my head so I was locking eyes with her, taking care so the reaction would seem natural and well intentioned to all those prissy elves in the crowd, I opened my mouth to question her on the meaning behind the entertainment she derived from my reaction. Perhaps I would use the opportunity to egg her on a little together with the always ready to banter dwarf at my side as a little revenge.
Contrary to my expectations though, she did not stay silent when I started opening my mouth to talk. Instead, only five words left her lips before I returned my head to its initial position, forgetting whatever it had been that I was going to say in order to get her worked up.
It was not your fault.
I had misunderstood. It was not a smile she had been fighting, but a worried frown instead.
My spear locks onto her lips for the third time in this short time-frame but they hold no clue that they were a simple moment ago being forced into a position that wouldn't suit them at all. The perks of being trained as royalty since you were but a child I suppose.
Control yourself.
As I calm my still beating heart, my mind went back to what Riveria had said, not the five words, but the counsel she had offered after the first hit. She had been right of course, as always.
Her words included no niceties, no beating around the bush, they cut directly into the heart of the problem with no care for how they would sound. They were curt yes, perhaps even rude for some people, but she would not have said them if she did not worry. She wouldn't have looked at my spear at an angle she knew would make me cross eyes with her if she did not care.
She also had no actual reason to do any of that to begin with, considering she knew there was no way anyone besides her and Gareth – and Loki obviously – could ever come to perceive even a glimpse of what I was truly feeling at any moment. Which only ended up making her true intentions even more clear.
The robes we found in the dungeon and the color of the hair attached to them had shaken me, as much as I didn't want to admit it, and both she and Gareth had spent far too much time with me not to notice, yet she made sure to try and get my mind away from it with that idiotic excuse.
Gareth tended to leave those kinds of things alone though. Riveria, in a rare act of bullheadedness of her part, insisted everything, from the biggest problem to the smallest inconvenience, should be resolved with maximum haste as to not spiral into bigger complications in the future.
Of course, that meant she too had been thinking too deeply on what we experienced in the abyss. She wouldn't have been able to recognize I would be doing the same otherwise. We were similar in that regard, worried too much about what was yet to come, and tended to overthink everything.
I pursued my lips as I felt my mind begin to wander against my will once again. If there was something I had not managed to have under complete control to this day then that was it.
That berserker skill had to come from somewhere after all.
Why couldn't I have predicted this? The clues were all there for me to see Riveria.
Memories of an old conversation spun around in my mind. No matter how much I tried not to think of it, it would always end up visiting me in moments like these.
Do not be a fool Finn, it does not suit you. If there was any way for you to predict this, then I too should also have had at least an inkling of what was about to happen. It was an unexpected attack, followed by a never-before-seen reaction by the dungeon. No matter how you look at it you couldn't have possibly used that guesstimation of yours to predict it.
We were in my office, the day after Lyra had died in the dungeon. The day after the Astraea Familia had been completely wiped out.
The day she had found me passed out on its floor, various bottles of alcohol strewn around, all empty of the liquid that once filled them.
My words came out slurred as if they were fighting every celch of the way up my throat. I felt weak and without will but despite my wishes the state I found myself in was not bad enough to allow me to forget what happened next.
Yes… but I fear it. I fear it Riveria. What if I did? What if I did and yet my subconscious willfully ignored it? Their erasure shall bring a short-term loss to Orario yes, but long term? Long term Riveria, our Familia loses nothing and only profits from this event. With their demise Orario will have no choice but to turn to us – to me – and Ganesha Familia for more help defending the city, and as such the-
Indeed, no matter how much I tried, how much I focused, her eyes that day I would never be able to forget. Neither would I forget the first and only time she had slapped me with enough force to make me turn my head. I still felt the burning of her hand on my left cheek when I passed my fingers through it.
Are you an idiot? She had asked me, fury taking over her eyes like Crozzo fire through an elven forest. A buffoon? Perhaps a mentally handicapped Pallum that has only been relying on luck and nothing else until now? Insult after insult left her mouth, abuse and offence that only she could level at me without at the same time sounding like a simple uneducated ruffian followed them without pause. Under the guise you wear, the mask you place on your face every day, under the act you play incessantly and without rest, under all that… rests the soul of a hero. There is no way your subconscious would have done what you fear, for it is the thing which most closely approaches the true you.
Her finger extended, touching the middle of my chest, I could also still feel to this day. Perhaps even heavier than the slap. Laying there, just another weight I was fated to bear each and every moment I stood awake. And sometimes while sleeping too.
It might not be today, nor tomorrow, nor ten or twenty years from now, but one day. Perhaps spurned by an event not even you could predict, or a situation too dire for anything else, one day it will release itself from the chains you place it under, the chains you feel you have to impose upon yourself.
She locked her deep green eyes with mine for what felt like an infinite amount of time. In the intoxicated state I found myself in, I feared I could get lost in them and not be able to find the path back.
That day little Hero, Orario shall tremble like it never has before. I eagerly await it, for it will finally show me the one you hide behind all those plans and plays, and it shall allow me to put to rest once and for all the burning question I have raging through my mind.
We had had similar discussions before, but none as directly related to the problem as this one, and none where she had actually said anything even closely resembling… that. It was as if she had embodied one of the spirits in the epics Lefiya and Tiona liked to read, and she had just given me a prophecy to which I would not be able to escape.
She left the room after that, leaving me alone with my thoughts, the door closing heavily behind her as if she could not withstand the presence of this me any longer. There had been the times where that was a daily occurrence, when the Familia was only I, she, and that annoying dwarf. People that could not be more different from each other, and that did not pass a day without butting heads. I liked to believe by now we had grown past all that though.
Following that display, my gaze drifted to one of the still full bottles on my desk. I thought about using it to forget the talk I just had. To forget the feelings she had reawakened inside me and I fought everyday to lock in the deepest parts of my soul.
Next thing I know, it was loudly hitting the wall, pieces of broken glass flying everywhere and liquid dripping down from it. My gaze drifted to my hand, disbelief holding my body hostage, before I just slumped onto my oversized chair in defeat.
I did not like admitting to it, but being besides Riveria made me want to seek a better way. To be better overall. To cast aside my worries, the rules I had imposed upon myself and just march into Ishtar's District and bring with me complete annihilation. Destroy the Slave Ring everybody knew she used yet had no way of proving. Free every girl she had conscripted into her familia that way. No thoughts given to the repercussions that were sure to follow such an act.
To just go and put an end to all the underground deals and business that was going around in the Recreation District that held most of the extraterritorial Casinos and Theaters. The illegal deals and contracts that were struck in it, and ended the lives of the powerless without a thought given to it.
To restructure Orario in a way that would make every God and Goddess that used their influence to abuse their Familia like Aeshma, Sekhmet and so many others, that used their reach and sway to try and bring back the Dark Age, completely unable to do so ever again. I knew it to be possible, I had detailed plans on how to do it and it would not even be that hard. In a world where we had beings that could detect any lie, and where my Goddess had taken that ability and pushed it into the realm of an artform, the possibilities were endless.
Yet I could not under any circumstance put any of them to use.
I could not simply start indiscriminately helping only for the sake of helping, and saving merely for the sake of saving. In this city, in this age, I could never be the Hero I think I desired to be.
Should I start doing that, should I forget my tenets and simply do what was right, simply act like a Hero would, it would be the end of all my hard-earned reputation, all my hard work until now would crumble, as if it were nothing but specks of dust falling through my helpless fingers.
Foreign countries would curse my name as I destroyed their businesses, the Gods of Orario too, for they did not care where and under what circumstances their entertainment was made, only that it came. I would be targeted from all sides, and Freya Familia would most likely start attempting to take its share of my corpse as well, like sharks drawn to a bloody fish. It would be the end of Loki Familia as I knew it.
Nonetheless I found there was a part of me that did not care about any of it. A part that wanted to show her that her faith was not misplaced, that I could be the man she believed to exist under all my masks and plots.
It was for that and more that I had once fallen in love with her.
It was for those same reasons I had never said anything about it.
The day I told her that, the day I gave in and admitted my feelings, on that day the name Finn would lose all its meaning. There would be no reason to carry it anymore, for my dream would have surely perished the moment I sealed my lips with hers for the second time in this life. As unlike the first, I would have been the one to start it, and I wouldn't be able to craft myself an excuse to stop there.
Finn – or Light, in the Pallum language – that fake name that my back did not show, could only illuminate a single path. Should I try to walk more than one at the same time, of a Hero and a Lover perhaps, I would inevitably end up falling on my face. And I had reached too far, done too much, to be able to afford that now, to simply allow everything I carried on my small back to fall with me once I inevitably ended up tripping on my own arrogance.
What was my happiness when faced with the hopes of an entire race? When pitted against all the ones who had given their lives for me and my goals with the hope I would one day bring about a better age? When compared to the desires and needs of an entire world?
Amid those thoughts, as if to drive home even deeper how powerless I truly was in the face of this era's pre-established rules, I heard Tione's voice.
She sounded happy, carefree even, though rare were the times she did not sound such. She, that foolish girl who insisted she was in love with me, was another regret of mine. To her I regretted not being able to tell the truth. That while the years we had spent together in this Familia had certainly made me grow fond of her I would never be able to love her as she wanted me to. I regretted not being to offer her the reprieve from her past she so deserved, by marching into Telskyura and breaking that damned country over my knee.
I regretted not being able to tell her, not being able to reveal that I had let the only girl that ever truly loved me die, and that I turned my back on the future I could've had with the only woman I ever truly loved.
I could never confide that to her, for that would break the status quo that had been created, it would make her perhaps grow to resent me, giving birth to problems inside the Familia which I could not afford right now. So, for that reason, for my selfish needs and because having someone as loyal to me as an amazon in love was extremely useful, I did not tell her. And so, she would continue pursuing me, someone that could never give her what she truly desired and that would throw her life away should it mean the fulfillment of his lifelong ambitions.
I moved my gaze up to the sky and confirmed for the umpteenth time that it was still true.
It was sad in a way, that the one the general population thought came closest to the ideal of a Hero, was one of the staunchest believers of the Adventurer's Maxim.
In the Age of Gods, no Hero can live.
So, all that is left, is faking being one to the best of my ability and pray to Fianna it is enough.
All while knowing it will never be.
That day, when my gaze caught sight of the white-haired boy, I thought nothing of him.
His eyes were filled with hope, his body seemed to radiate innocence, each and every movement he made spoke of a kind of carefree trust he should not have in this city. Never before had I seen someone so unsuited to being an adventurer, and it was my naïve hope that he had not come here to become one, for it would certainly destroy him.
On one of his jumps, the highest one till then, I noticed his lips moving, only three words escaping them.
They're real.
For the first time in my life, I had heard someone and not been immediately able to identify the emotion they were feeling. As if the micro expressions on his face, the way his lips moved, and the way his eyes seemed to momentarily change tone, conveyed two different messages at the same time from that simple phrase.
One of awe, representing the wonder he felt by seeing a famous person first hand.
Another of pure disbelief, as if he did not believe the image his eyes were capturing.
I had not cared much for it, and that had been simply another one of the many mistakes I committed in this life of mine.
The next time I met him my assessment would not have changed; he was still completely unsuited for the life of an adventurer. But the motives, the reason why I deigned him such, those would have been completely replaced, and that would make all the difference.
I wondered, knowing what I did now, if I should not have obeyed my instincts at the time and simply ended the boy's life right then.
Had I done that, perhaps Orario would not be on the brink of kickstarting a war against the entire world right now.
And I wouldn't have changed to the point of welcoming it with open arms.
XXX
Good(ish) news, if I decide to simply post the next chapter without padding it much more, then it should come out sooner than this one at the very least.
That brings me to my second point though, padding.
Do you guys think this chapter felt like filler? While I am relatively proud of how it came out, and it was kind of necessary for a few future set-ups I have planned, I feel it is a bit too much of tell and too little of show. Probably more accentuated by the fact Deimne feels no need to describe the people around him since, you know, he sees them basically every day of his life lol. I tried to include little tidbits that require a bit more attention, and as such aren't simply a telling show, like the fact Finn keeps focusing on Riveria's lips even when he knows it to be unnecessary, but I don't know if it came out as I wanted.
I honestly find him to be such an interesting character you know? He has a well-defined personality, with motives for why he became what he is and flaws to accompany them, if we discount the fact he simply threw his entire ideology away because… a monster did not attack Bell? Bah, while I liked the moment it could have a bit more build-up to it honestly. But he is not really a main character so it's not like I don't understand why the book can't be focused much on him.
Also yeah, the delay, honestly didn't think it would last this long, but (a few days after the last update) I got sent to the hospital after fainting (for possibly the stupidest reason ever) which also ended up contributing to the break a bit lol. Didn't really spend much time there, it seems I was just somewhat dehydrated and with low blood pressure so they pumped me with two bags of sodium chlorite and sent me away after 2 hours more or less.
Still gave a hell of a scare to my family. Fucking covid.
After that it was basically college with one project every week and at least a miniature test to accompany it. The week after this one I am going to have 3 tests plus the project so wish me luck lol.
Anyways, that's it I guess, this chapter was more to introduce a character that (hopefully) is going to be used more than in the original novel, and as such make it worth spending an entire chapter (and the second one no less) all on him and his perspective of the world. Next one we finally get to the meat and potatoes of the story with Bell receiving his status and being taken over.
This is Lord Mammon Asmodeus, and I shall see you guys next chapter.