Chương 74: I Couldn’t Maintain My Cool

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles Evelisse was taking it all surprisingly well. I had laid it out, the Afterport without ever calling it that, the isekai business, the whole world-balance thing. I'd even, in a sense, dragged her god's name through the mud, telling her Lord Luminaryn had orchestrated the holy monsters, Ywain's broken blessings, even the tragedy of the Mantis Beast. I'd braced for doubt. Shock, at least, and a good deal of I can't accept this. Instead, she simply said she trusted me. Just like that.

She'd said it to me once before, after the last fight with Ywain, but this? After I'd dumped an entire other world's worth of impossible truth on her? What could I possibly have done to earn that kind of trust from someone like her? And she was holding my hand, too, looking at me with something I could only call sincerity, like she needed me to know she truly, genuinely meant it.

I swear, if the moment held a second longer, if she just closed her eyes, I might have actually leaned in and gone for a kis— She closed her eyes. What the— Then she let go of my hand and started rubbing at her eye.

"S-sorry. Bit of ash got in," she said, still wiping. Of course. Of course. Why would an actual romantic moment ever happen to me? And even if one did, I doubted I could see it through. Kissing a girl I'd known for less than a month? Ha. Sure.

"R-right. Maybe we should move over there? Near the bush?" I offered, thinking the fire's smoke was the culprit. The instant it left my mouth I realized how that sounded. Crap. Shady. Deeply, deeply inappropriate. I wanted to sink into the ground. She finished rubbing at last and looked up at me, eyes a little teary at the edges. And, oddly, or maybe not oddly at all, I found myself thinking she was pretty.

She'd always been striking, in that clean, knightly yet still feminine way of hers, but something about her, right then, looked different. Maybe her saying she trusted me had lit something up in me, and now I was sliding straight back into creep territory. No. Not now. I'd kept myself perfectly composed for days, a week and more, even. I was in a groove. Things were finally going well. I was not about to ruin this stride by getting all weird and moon-eyed.

There were real problems in front of me; the elves, Ywain, that needed solving.

"What was that?" Evelisse asked.

"I didn't quite catch it—I was a bit distracted." Oh, thank God she hadn't. The bush comment would've undone whatever nice thing we had going here.

"O-oh! I was just saying that... uh." I grasped for anything.

"The moon's beautiful tonight!" Damn it. Damn it. If she happened to know what that phrase was supposed to mean, then—"Mm. It really is," she said, tilting her face up to look at it, tucking a wind-loosened strand of hair behind her ear. Wait. No. They didn't have that here, did they?

There was no possible way she'd know that "the moon is beautiful tonight" was practically a stand-in for I love you—the line credited to Natsume Sōseki, the famous Meiji-era Japanese novelist, who'd supposedly offered it as a more fitting translation than a blunt confession. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.... Right. As if a single soul in Lycora would have the faintest idea who that was.

"Hey," Evelisse turned back to me.

"Do you mind if I ask a few things? About... everything you just told me." Right. Of course she had questions. I'd be shocked if she didn't.

"Sure," I said. So, she asked, and I answered. Her first question was why Lord Luminaryn hadn't used the holy monsters and the overpowered blessings of the Hero on the previous Dark Lords, but only on me. My honest answer would've been simple: because Lulu or Lord Luminaryn was fixated on Ywain, perhaps borderline obsessed, and would do anything to guarantee his win this time. But that felt too demeaning to say outright.

However tangled the truth was, Lord Luminaryn was still, in name, the most worshipped god in all of Lycora.

"Ywain's her champion. The Hero she personally picked out," I said instead.

"So my guess is she just wants him to succeed this time, no matter what. And the gods change their rules constantly, like even the whole world-balance thing got deleted. So honestly, some of it might be coincidence. Like, she tested something out, the other gods decided it was overkill, and so this time around there's fewer blessings and no more holy-trolls."

"Her?" Evelisse's brow furrowed. Oh. Right. Here they called Lord Luminaryn a he.

"So, umm, I was told Lord Luminaryn's actually a woman. I guess the avatar she uses down here is a man?" I waved a hand.

"Anyway, I wouldn't sweat the small stuff." Great. Now it sounded like I was inventing things on the spot. Which, to be fair, I sort of was, at least the parts I was smoothing over.

"Then what about the Mantis Beast?" Eve pressed.

"That's the part I still can't make sense of. Why would Lord Luminaryn slaughter His—Her—own people?"

"That one, I don't know for sure either." I paused.

"But one possibility... is that it was meant to make you hate me."

"Hate you?" I nodded.

"Yeah. If I remember right, Ywain was saying stuff about me killing people, wasn't he? Something about the Mantis Beast being part of my plan all along." She went still, thinking it through, and then her eyes widened, some piece of it clicking into place.

"Y-yes. So you're saying..." Her voice dropped.

"Ywain might have arranged this with Lord Luminaryn. Staged it. Slaughtered innocents, just so that I would despise you?" The way she'd phrased it made Lord Luminaryn sound outright evil. Which she was, but how was I supposed to answer that? If I just said yes, exactly, it would come off like I was the one smearing her god, and her trust in me might start to crack. Even if it was, from my end, the honest answer.

"I don't know," I said instead.

"Even Greg and Nyx never told me that part; just that it was Lord Luminaryn's doing." I decided to leave my own theory out of it. Cleaner to be honest about what I didn't know than to pile on speculation. She didn't look satisfied with that, which made complete sense. Being told your god had orchestrated a mass murder wasn't the kind of thing anyone accepted easily. But maybe realizing there wasn't much she could do with the uncertainty, she moved on to her next question.

"Do you think I should tell sis and Mel about all this?"

"I checked with Nyx. She said they can know." I shrugged.

"But I think I'll leave that one up to you."

"Up to me?"

"Yeah. I've got no idea how they'd take it. I mean—I spent almost the entire day just trying to figure out how to break it to you." I paused.

"Though, you've taken it a lot better than I expected."

"I... have?"

"You have. I figured you'd push back way harder. Doubt me, or flat-out refuse some of it, the Lord Luminaryn parts especially."

"Well... I..." She trailed off. And then her eyes widened, just slightly, like something had quietly landed on her.

"I—I don't know. It just... happened, I suppose." She finished with a small, dry laugh. It was a sight I hardly ever got from her. And, well, she was cute, doing that. What was going through her head?

"O-okay, so, I think it comes down to you," I said.

"If you feel like they should know, then tell them."

"Got it. I'll think it over." Another silence settled between us. Awkward. We'd been racking up a lot of those lately.

"T-then, if there's nothing else." I pushed up to my feet and started to turn.

"I should probably go and—" A tug at my robe. I glanced back. She had a hand fisted in the dark fabric, holding me there, and her expression, when I caught it, was strange. Like she was bracing herself for something. Like she needed an answer she wasn't sure she wanted.

"S-sorry." She let go.

"Can I ask one more thing?"

"Okay?"

"What's..." She hesitated.

"What's... Nyx to you?"