Chương 73: Trust

POV: Evelisse Ardentia Dinner was... different. We sat around the fire outside, meat skewers and fruit passed between us. Sis was talking about buying a proper stove and some cooking equipment tomorrow, so we could have more variety of meals, such as different vegetables, soups, that sort of thing. Since none of us had been branded traitors of the Church yet, we could still move through the towns freely. But Arkhay would have decent options for those kinds of things, so we'd get them there.

Even if the Church did brand us tomorrow, Arkhay was already a safe zone for us.

"Tomorrow's going to be a busy day," sis said, peeling a banana.

"I hope you're up for it, Milo."

"Huh? Y-yeah, sure..." Milo started, like he'd been somewhere else entirely.

"Um, sorry, what is it I'm doing, again?" Sis pouted, the playful kind.

"Shopping with me tomorrow, and then, if Astrea makes its announcement, returning the hostages to them."

"Oh. Right, right. Sure." Then he went quiet again, chewing his meat, eyes fixed on the fire. I glanced at Nyx. She'd already finished hers. She reached for a pear and got to her feet.

"What? Done already?" Sis raised a brow.

"You usually put away at least four." Nyx's eyes flicked to Milo. He looked back at her, and something crossed her expression, there and gone, a mere flicker. She started off toward the house.

"I'm already full tonight," she said. The door shut behind her, and for a while an awkward quiet settled over the rest of us, broken only by the fire and the sound of the elf steadily working through her food. The elf had gone through five skewers already. As she set the sixth stick down beside her, she finally delivered her verdict.

"Whew, those were delici—definitely average."

"Says the person who ate six," Mel muttered, biting into an apple.

"One of which was mine."

"I graciously accepted your offering, human. Keep it up and you may yet be blessed by—""You took it! I didn't offer you anything!"

"And you ought to be grateful I took it." The two of them carried on like that. For all the insults, they seemed to be getting along better than I'd expected. I was midway through my banana when I felt sis tap my shoulder. I turned, and she tipped her head—a small, pointed nudge—toward Milo, who was gnawing absently at a pear, still staring into the flames. Something must have happened to him, but what? Something between him and Nyx? It had come on so suddenly. Or was it that I'd left him alone this afternoon?

Maybe both?

"You should talk to him, after this," sis murmured against my ear, low enough that Milo wouldn't catch it. Though, at this point, I doubted he'd have caught much of anything. Before long, we'd all finished. The elf went in first, announcing she wanted an early night. Then sis followed with Mel, who shot me a suspicious sort of look on her way past but let it go without comment. I should talk to him. At least ask what was wrong.

And if it turned out to be my fault, then I'd—"Evelisse," Milo said, before I could get there.

"Huh?"

"I... need to talk to you."

"O-okay." We sat side by side, a little apart from the fire, since Milo said it was a sensitive sort of topic. I'd been close to him before, even held his hand, so it shouldn't have meant much. And yet, simply sitting beside him like this, on a quiet evening, with him wanting to share something not meant for the others' ears, I could feel my heartbeat quickening.

"So..." Milo started.

"It's about that stuff. The things I kept telling you I'd explain, a few days ago, and again yesterday." Oh. That. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Right. I did need to hear this. I was the one who'd pushed him for it, after all, I even leaned on his guilt to get it. He was finally about to tell me, and yet something in my chest dipped, quiet and formless, a small sinking I couldn't account for. Why? What had I been expecting?

"The thing is," he said, "I'm from another world." What? For a moment, I'd half believed Milo was making some elaborate joke. He told me he came from a place called Earth, a world where nearly everything was different from this one. He'd been a college student, whatever that was, and then one day he'd been hit by a truck, some sort of large transport machine, and, as far as he could tell, died. That death had carried him to an afterlife. A realm of gods.

There, one of those gods named Greg, the bald man who'd saved us before, had assigned him the role of Dark Lord. Lord Luminaryn, it turned out, was another of the gods of that realm. There were a great many of them, apparently, each governing different worlds. Then he moved on to his level 9999, another thing I couldn't quite grasp, though he did his best to make it plain.

In essence, his strength and durability ran so far past any ordinary human that, from everything he knew, only holy-element attacks could truly wound him. He had skills, too, that grew more powerful the higher his Terror Level climbed, that part I followed well enough, since he'd told me something like it once before. After that came the anomalies. The holy-element monsters, Ywain's blessings, and the Mantis Beast that had torn through Mistros; all of it, he said, had been Lord Luminaryn's doing.

That was where I felt things did not really make sense. The holy monsters, the blessings, those I could understand. They had been attempts by Lord Luminaryn to bring Milo down. But the Mantis Beast? All that creature had done was spread destruction, kill, and drive Milo's Terror Level upward. If Lord Luminaryn wanted Milo dead, sending a monster that only made him stronger made no sense at all. It didn't fit, but I decided to hold the question until Milo had finished.

Last of all, he came to the matter of the world's balance. That there was meant to be an equilibrium between fear and hope, and that this was the very reason Dark Lords existed. To influence that balance. To seed the world with despair. That was the part I could least believe, because it meant the gods held despair to be necessary. And so long as they believed it, there could never be true peace. The Dark Lords would keep coming.

Sacrifices would keep being demanded, over and over, until each was struck down, only for the next to rise in its place. I'd always known Dark Lords would spawn. But I—no, none of us—had ever known it was a designed thing. A system. For as long as anyone could remember, Heroes had fought the Dark Lord in the hope that theirs would be the last one. Every one of us had clung to that sliver of hope, that if we just won, the darkness would finally end.

And now I was being told it never would, that it was built never to end. And that the gods had permitted it, all along. It was, to put it mildly, absurd. Milo added, quickly, that for whatever reason, none of that was a concern anymore. Lord Luminaryn had somehow done away with the balance system entirely, which meant this cycle, the current one, would be the last of them. Once Milo died, there would be no more Dark Lords. Ever.

"So... I suppose once I'm dead, everyone finally gets their precious eternal peace," he said. And he almost laughed as he said it.

"No." The word left me before he'd even finished, before I'd decided to say it. Milo's eyes went wide. He'd probably expected me to be more torn on the matter, and, to be honest, my own certainty startled me a little too, because what he'd said made sense. If all of it was true, then once Milo was gone, no new Dark Lord would rise. There'd still be squabbles between kingdoms, political tension, the ordinary frictions of the world, but no more mindless slaughter, no more razed towns.

Everyone would be able to live in something closer to peace. And yet…

"You're not doing the things a Dark Lord does," I said.

"And I don't think you deserve to die for that. As I mentioned before…I believe we can achieve peace without you dying." Milo went quiet a moment.

"... Do you actually believe everything I just told you?" I thought about it. There were questions, certainly. Why Lord Luminaryn had thrown so much effort into killing this Dark Lord and none of the ones before. The Mantis Beast that made no sense. The strange cruelty of the cycle itself. But those were things I needed clarity on, and not things I took for lies.

"I do," I said. Then I found my hand reaching for his, taking it, lifting it up into the space between us.

"I told you already. I trust you." If he'd lied to me about any of this, I think I truly would have come apart. But over these past several days, I'd watched how earnest he was, choosing the slow, roundabout way at every turn instead of the easy path of destruction. If the world needed no balance now, and Lord Luminaryn wanted him dead all the same, he could have driven his Terror Level up as fast as possible. The pressure to do exactly that had never been greater. And still, he chose to talk things through.

To do it slowly. To do it right. In truth, he'd been telling me who he was since the very first proper conversation we'd had, right here in this clearing. I still remembered the first question he ever asked me.

"Are you tired?" He'd been forced into the role of Dark Lord, made to spread fear in the name of his own survival, when all he wanted was to not be a monster. Back then, I'd tried to wave the question off. A stalling tactic, I'd thought. A trick, maybe, to manipulate me into joining his side. Now that I'd seen him, truly seen him, I hoped, I understood why the two of us were so alike. We'd stood at opposite ends of our roles, and yet our circumstances were not all that different.

I had been handed the Hero's mantle, to sis's quiet dismay. He had been forced into the villain's, to his own despair. Neither of us had ever been asked what we wanted. And now, at last, we could choose. We could do what we actually believed in. Looking into his eyes, I couldn't find the faintest trace of a lie in them. I couldn't truly know, of course, not from his eyes alone. But it was what I felt, and I decided that was enough. I would keep on trusting him.