Chapter 24

The Hero’s Story After two years of traveling, I arrived at the location of the fallen Kingdom of Malika. I made my father’s hometown, the village of Retin, my tentative destination. Since Malika had been closest to the Demon Lord’s territory, the land was still ravaged two years after the Demon Lord’s defeat. There were hardly any humans around. Even if I go, there might be nothing there. My late father had always said he wanted me to meet my grandfather in Retin. That thought was what brought me this far, but there was also the possibility that there might not even be a village at all. I had no mother or father anymore. If my grandfather wasn’t around, either, where exactly was I supposed to go? I’d stayed alive so I could defeat the Demon Lord in Ares’s place. Now that I had seen this goal through, I honestly had no idea what to do. For a time, I played at being an adventurer as I traveled the world, helping reconstruct towns and villages and slaying monsters when asked. Being thanked did make me feel a little gratified, I suppose. All my life, I’d been too late for the things that mattered. I’d wanted to go help my parents, but I’d been a powerless kid at the time. I studied swordplay and magic with Ares, but none of it stuck. I never got good at the sword even though my father was so great, and I couldn’t use magic at all despite being my mother’s son—a mage’s son. So I couldn’t help Ares when he became the Hero. I watched him die. After I joined Falm Academy under Ares’s name, I somehow managed to hone my sword skills and learn magic, but even then, I wasn’t anything special. I knew that better than anyone. I worked so, so hard to become the Hero, but the only reason I was able to defeat the Demon Lord was because I had Leon, Maria, and Solon with me. It wasn’t my power that did it. If I’d asked the Prophet for it, we could have had a world where Ares was alive. But that was exactly the one thing I couldn’t ask for. It was the one rule I couldn’t break. Although my life wasn’t so great in a lot of ways and I couldn’t save a single person I wanted to save, I still strove to do my very best. I didn’t want to invalidate all those things I did—it would turn my whole life into a lie. Except…in the end, I had nothing. I went back to being Zack, said good-bye to my three friends, and took off on a lonely, hollow journey. Part of me wanted to see Princess Alexia. She’d gone out of her way to tell me, “Don’t die! You don’t have to defeat the Demon Lord!” It warmed my heart to hear that. I never expected someone to worry about what happened to me not because I was the Hero but as another human being. She hadn’t looked at me as Ares the Hero but as me. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the capital. If I did, everything would be for naught. According to a map I got from Malikan refugees in another country, I was getting close to the location of Retin—if it still existed. In the distance, my eyes spotted white smoke in the sky. Someone was there. My feet felt a little lighter. Eventually, I arrived at something that resembled a village. The buildings were dilapidated, but there were people around. As I made my way toward the settlement, a lone old man came to approach me. His clothing wasn’t in great shape—a sure indication of how rough life was around here. “I’m the chief of Retin. Are you by any chance related to Vince?” he asked. Vince was the name of my grandfather. “I’m his grandson, Zack. My father is Luke.” “Luke… Now that brings back memories. Is he doing well?” “He died fighting the Demon Lord’s army.” “I see…” The old man closed his eyes and hung his head slightly, silently mourning the dead. “Many in this village perished as well. Vince included.” So my grandfather did pass away, just as I’d thought. Although I hadn’t expected a reunion, it still came as a small shock. “You look a lot like Vince. That’s how I knew you were related. Come with me. I’ll show you his grave,” the old man said as he broke into a stride. I followed him. Along the way, we met quite a few villagers. When the old man explained that I was Vince’s grandson, they all wanted to shake my hand. “Your grandfather saved my life,” they told me. The chief led me to a ruined house on the outskirts of the village. Being close to the mountains, the property was on a slightly elevated piece of land, giving it an unbroken view of Retin. There was a small gravestone next to the house. “Vince lived here. Luke was born here, too. This gravestone was the first thing I made after I returned to this village. His body isn’t here, but it was the least I could do.” The old man put his hands together in front of his chest. I did the same. “What was my grandfather like?” My father had said he was “the person I respect most in the world.” From how the villagers acted, I could guess that he’d been an upstanding man. “A dunce.” The old man laughed. It was a surprising answer. “Vince and I grew up together. He was always worse at picking things up than I was whenever we played. He’d been that way since we were kids.” That sounded a lot like me and Ares. “But, you know, I lost to Vince in the end. I settled for being good enough, while he kept applying himself until he could finally do it properly. It was all because of his natural clumsiness. In that sense, I never won against him.” The old man recounted the story fondly. It felt like he was praising me somehow. “I heard that my grandfather was a hunter, and that he also did some adventuring work here and there,” I said. My father had told me bits and pieces about him when I was young. “He was born into a family of hunters, and so he became a hunter. He was terrible at it when he started out. His father yelled at him all the time.” “But he kept at it diligently, right?” “Diligent doesn’t begin to describe it. He’d hole himself up in the mountains and wouldn’t come back down until he’d caught his game. It wouldn’t just be for one or two days, either. He’d stay for ages, long enough that his father would get worried and bring him back home. The fact that he took that long doesn’t say much about his hunting skills, but I’d say he was the best in the world when it came to sheer persistence.” That brought a little smile to my face. My grandfather sounded kind of like me. “He got the hang of it eventually and settled down with a wife. Although she passed away too soon, she was a beautiful person who could do anything. Luke took after her. But Luke was very attached to Vince.” I hadn’t heard much about my grandmother. Since she passed away when my father was young, he barely remembered her, it seemed. “Anyway, since I belonged to the village chief’s family, I was in charge of minding the fields and the village. But one day, monsters showed up. That was a problem for a tiny village like ours since we didn’t have the money to hire adventurers. So I asked Vince if he could hunt the monsters.” What an insane request. Animals and monsters were on completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of threats. If hunters were capable of defeating monsters, nobody would need adventurers. My surprise must have shown on my face, because the old man rushed to continue his story. “I knew it was an unreasonable thing to ask. I wasn’t trying to force him into anything. But Vince accepted the challenge. I paid him for his trouble, of course, although it was short change compared with an adventurer’s rate.” My grandfather sounded perhaps a bit too nice for his own good. “This was Vince we’re talking about, so of course, he wasn’t good at it at first. But everyone knew that he’d pull through eventually. Whatever you could say about him, we all liked him and depended on him.” “So he learned to hunt the monsters?” “Yeah. It took him about a year, but he improved his weapons and traps and took his time to finish off those monsters carefully. Thanks to him, we’re alive and well to this day. But when word got around to the other villages, they asked him to take care of their monster problems, too. He accepted their requests with nary a grimace. He kept at it, picking off those monsters one by one, and somewhere along the line, people started calling him ‘the Hero of the frontier.’” “The Hero…you say?” It was the first I’d heard of this. “Well, that was just how grateful we were. The real Hero defeated the Demon Lord and saved the world, but if Vince didn’t slay those monsters at our doorsteps, we wouldn’t have lived to see the next day. Luke admired his father so much that he became an adventurer. Apparently, Vince wanted to pass on his hunting skills, but Luke was more inspired by the things Vince did that made him the Hero in everyone’s eyes.” “Ah, I see.” My father had said that he became an adventurer because he wanted to help people. That must have been my grandfather’s influence. “Luke left the village to become an adventurer, but he always planned to come back one day and take up the monster culling in Vince’s stead. But then the Demon Lord appeared and launched an invasion on this country.” I was six years old when the Demon Lord attacked Malika. “Vince was the first to catch on. One day, he said, ‘The monsters have been acting funny.’ There were more of them around, and their movements seemed aggravated. Vince warned me to abandon this village and run somewhere far away.” I didn’t like where this was going. “What happened?” The answer was what I expected. “I believed him, but the villagers didn’t. Or rather, not everyone could escape. The nearby villages were in the same boat, and not everyone was willing to throw away their current lives to go to some distant place. They hoped that Vincent’s gloomy prediction was wrong and didn’t do anything.” I figured that would be the case. People were shortsighted like that. Instead of thinking things through rationally, they’d cling to what they wished would happen. But maybe that was only natural. “He was right, in the end. One day, Vince told us that a huge swarm of monsters was headed for the village. They didn’t believe it until they saw the monsters with their own eyes. By then, of course, it was too late.” “What happened after that?” “Vince and I had our escape plans ready: what to bring, what roads to use, how we would get away, and so on. Thanks to our preparations, we managed to get the villagers out. I led the group, and he was at the rear. His job was to slow down the monsters with the traps he’d set beforehand.” “And then my grandfather…” “Yes, he died during the escape. He fought the monsters till his last breath so that as many people as possible could get out. Plenty of villagers died as well. But still, many lives were saved because of him.” Mom and Dad died fighting for people, too. Was that another thing they got from my grandfather? “Vince’s escape route took us to the neighboring country. Although the Kingdom of Malika fell, the villagers of Retin survived because of him. And now we’re back here, rebuilding the village in his honor.” The old man’s eyes turned misty. “To tell you the truth, a few days before the monsters attacked, I said to Vince, ‘We should escape together.’ His family and mine. The way I saw it, there was no point fighting for the villagers who didn’t bother listening to him. But he refused to get on board. He said, ‘I’m staying here.’ Even now, I don’t know what was going through his head. I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want to lose him. But…that’s how it panned out.” The old man touched the gravestone tenderly. “He was a Hero. We were the ones who killed the Hero. Because a Hero is someone who fights for weak people like us. But I wonder, you know, if we were worth the gamble he played. If only we’d been a little stronger, a little smarter, he wouldn’t have had to die. He wouldn’t have had to sacrifice himself. He could have run. Why did he have to stay behind…?” The old man grieved for his best friend. Having lost Ares, I empathized painfully well. But… “I think I understand a little how my grandfather must have felt.” “What do you mean?” I looked down at the view of Retin sprawled out before me. It was by no means a large village, and the scars from the battle had not yet faded. But the residents were hard at work, trying to get the place back on its feet. Retin wasn’t the only place like this. You could find similar sights across the entire world. It was the picture of an ordinary day, and yet there was something so very precious about it. “He had something he wanted to protect in spite of it all,” I said. The things my grandfather strove to protect still existed in a tangible form. Likewise, I’d thought I had nothing, but plenty of things still remained for me. I felt like I could finally feel proud of myself for what I’d done. That night, I stayed in the old man’s house. The day after, I helped rebuild the village my grandfather died to protect.