Chương 58: “Putting Him Down”

"Just end him already," Celestia said. Arthur turned his head towards her.

"What?"

"How many bodies does it take before you finally realize that there's no turning back?" Arthur's grip on his wooden sword tightened. The man was on the ground, his remaining arm barely holding him upright, purple skin cracking along the joints.

"Everyone deserves a second chance at redemption," Arthur said. He looked directly at Celestia.

"If anyone would know that better, it would be you." The corridor went quiet. Liana, still beside Anna, looked up sharply.

"Arthur!" Celestia stared at him, but Arthur's gaze didn't waver.

"And if that redemption fails?" Celestia asked.

"When this man walks free and does this again, whose hands does the blood fall on?" She took a step toward him.

"Yours?" Arthur opened his mouth, but Celestia was already moving past him. She dropped the fan-spear. It clattered against the stone floor, and she didn't look back at it. She walked toward the man slumped against the corridor's wall. Dust still hung in the air from the explosion earlier, and fragments of stone crunched under her shoes. Up close, the transformation was already coming undone. The dark mana that had enhanced his body was dissipating, pulling back beneath his skin in uneven patches.

Where it receded, the flesh beneath was shriveling, the muscle contracting and thinning. His remaining hand trembled against the floor, fingers curling inward. The stump where his left arm had been had stopped bleeding, but only because the skin around it had dried and tightened like old leather. The price of violating the principles of the world was already showing. Celestia kept walking toward him. If she let Arthur speak to him again, she knew what he would do. Talk, empathize; give the man a hero's send-off.

Arthur would kneel down beside him and say something earnest, and this pathetic excuse of a person would get to die looking at someone who believed in him.

'No.' This man had bled students dry in a ritual circle. Even with the repercussions he was facing now, shriveling and broken on the ground, he had chosen every step that brought him here. Arthur could believe what he wanted, but Celestia was not going to let it slide.

"Do you honestly think," Celestia said, loud enough for Arthur to hear behind her, "that this sorry excuse of a human being is capable of good? After everything he's done?"

"Yes," Arthur said. His voice didn't waver.

"Of course." Celestia said nothing for a moment. Then, "Hmm." She crouched down in front of the man. His head hung low, his breathing ragged; the violet rings in his eyes had begun to fade, and the veins across his face and neck were visible through his thinning skin. He was conscious, but only just. As she studied his face, his eyes drifted, unfocused, until they found hers.

"Then let me ask him something," Celestia said. She leaned closer. The man's eyes focused on her. Up close, he looked younger than she'd expected. The dark mana had aged his features after the fight, but there were still some areas that showed his true face underneath. Celestia whispered, "The end the Hero thinks you deserve is not one that will take hold." * Arthur's earliest memory was of his father carrying him on his shoulders through the village square. He couldn't have been older than four.

The sun had been setting behind the treeline, and the market stalls were closing for the day. His father, still in his guard's uniform, had lifted him up so he could see over the crowd. Arthur remembered grabbing fistfuls of his father's hair to keep steady, and his father laughing about it the whole walk home. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. His father had been a knight once.

A low-ranking, and yet, still a proper one who had served in the border campaigns for twelve years before an injury to his leg ended his career. He'd returned to the village where he'd grown up, married Arthur's mother, and taken the post of village guard. It was a quiet life. His mother cooked, mended clothes, kept the small garden behind their house in order, and made sure Arthur was fed, washed, and in bed by sundown.

His father walked the village perimeter every morning and evening, checked the fences, settled disputes between neighbors, and occasionally chased off wild animals that wandered too close to the livestock pens. They weren't wealthy; a guard's pay covered food and the upkeep on their modest home, and not much else. Arthur wore hand-me-downs from the other families in the village, and his shoes were always a size too big or a size too small. But the house was warm, and dinner was always on the table.

His father taught him the basics of swordsmanship using wooden sticks in the yard behind the house. Then there were the storybooks. Despite being a commoner, he was able to learn to read since his mother had worked as a schoolteacher at a capital city before returning to her hometown after an incident. She had a small collection of storybooks, maybe a dozen in total, kept on a shelf. She read to him every night before bed, and Arthur would lie there with the blanket pulled up to his chin, listening.

There were many myths and legends, but his favorite story was about the Great Demon War. There had been a hero. This hero had journeyed across the entire continent to face the Demon King, and along the way, he had done what heroes in stories always did: he helped people. The hero didn't just save villages and protect the innocent. He walked into bandit camps and talked their leaders into laying down their weapons.

He crossed into barbarian territory and sat with their chieftains, sharing meals and learning their customs until they called him a friend. The hero didn't just defeat the Demon King, he managed to build an alliance out of people the rest of the world had given up on, and together, they achieved peace across all the lands. Arthur wanted to be like him. He said so to his father one evening, after practice in the yard.

His father had looked at him for a long moment, then sat down on the back step and gestured for Arthur to sit beside him.

"That's a good thing to want," his father had said.

"But you should know that most people won't make it easy for you."

"Why, dad?" Arthur had asked him what he meant with his squeaky voice. And that was when his father taught him lessons about his knighthood, about how in the face of adversity, a man should always face forward and stay true to his beliefs. That was why, even now, standing in a half-destroyed corridor with dust in his lungs and blood on his sleeve, he still believed there was good in the man on the ground. The same way he'd believed it about every person he'd met. He didn't hear what Celestia whispered to the man.

She had crouched down close, her back to Arthur. He thought that she was giving him something akin to a last word, from noble to noble. Then Celestia stood up. She turned and walked past Arthur without a word. Her pace was brisk, and she was, for some reason, what Arthur could not understand for the life of him, humming. Arthur watched her go for a second, then turned back to the man. He instinctively felt that something was wrong, so he took a step forward.

The man's mouth was open, and it looked like there were objects inside, several of them, packed tightly together. His eyes were wide, staring at Arthur. Arthur didn't know what they were.

"Hey, Celesti—" The explosion hit before the word left his mouth. Boom! A heat blast threw Arthur off his feet. His back slammed into the corridor wall, and his head bounced off the stone. The sound was enormous, a single concussive roar that swallowed every other noise and replaced it with a high, thin ringing in his ears. Arthur slid to the floor as his vision grew hazy. It only took a few moments for sound to come back in pieces.

The ringing compressed into a whine, and through it, he could hear his name, muffled and distant.

"Arthur! Arthur!" Hands on his shoulders. A warm glow pressed against the side of his head. Liana's face appeared into focus above him, her eyes wide. The green light of her healing magic pulsed against his temple, and the blurriness started to recede. He grabbed her arm and pushed himself upright. His ears were still ringing, but his vision had steadied enough to see. Liana said something to him, her hand still on his shoulder, but he couldn't make out the words. He shook his head and pulled away from her.

His legs felt unsteady, and the floor was covered in debris that crunched and shifted under his boots as he stood. He looked back toward where the man had been. There was a scorch mark on the wall and floor. Fragments of stone and ash. A reddish-black smear where the body had been sitting, and nothing beyond it. Arthur stared at the spot. His hand was still gripping his wooden sword. He didn't remember holding onto it through the blast, but his fingers were locked around the handle. Liana had followed his gaze.

Her hands, still faintly glowing from the healing, dropped to her sides. She covered her mouth and turned away. Then Arthur turned and saw Celestia standing further down the corridor, past the breach in the wall. Her arms were at her sides, and she was watching him.

"Ce— Celestia...!!" Arthur's voice cracked as he screamed her name. He took a step toward her, then another, his legs unsteady beneath him. Celestia tilted her head. The corner of her mouth pulled upward.

"Won't you forgive me," she said, "just like how you forgave him?" Synchronization: 21%... 25%