“Siem Saevas, here I bear the attendant’s mark. Second gift — Holy Sinking Blade! ”
Melia jumped up as well and met it in midair. She tore through it with her glowing daggers before hitting the ground in a run as she quickly located her next target. A monkey-like Beast was ahead a little to the right. It stood there frozen, still processing what had happened. She dashed toward it at breakneck speed, shifting her body left and right in the process to produce a zigzag effect. Her motion confused the Beast and prevented it from reacting in time to her approach. Her blade flashed. By the time the Beast’s head fell, she was already moving toward another one.
“...Melia?”
Sain watched her with a look of concern. Something about the way she was fighting felt off. At first, he’d assumed it was a bit of extra enthusiasm to prove she was fine, but it soon became apparent that wasn’t the case. Melia always fought with a kind of aplomb that almost dared her enemies to step it up and actually challenge her a little. That sense of confident composure was absent in her today. She fought with urgency, as though pressed by some invisible deadline.
“...Next!” she huffed as she moved in a lethal blur from Beast to Beast, leaving a trail of sweat and corpses in her wake. However, her still-frail body couldn’t keep up with such intense and continuous demand. Her strength failed her just as she reached one of them, and her legs gave way. The Beast saw its opening and pounced. The shadow of its massive claw blotted out the sky, and she heard the deadly swish as it swiped at her neck.
“Are you okay?”
Sain stood before her, his sword held steady against the offending claw. He looked backward and gave her a look of concern.
“...Yes, I’m fine.”
“Good... But stay closer to us. You’re running too far ahead.”
He pushed the claw away with a powerful swing that curved back into the Beast and split it in two. It was a rare blunder from Melia. Beasts of Chaos, lowly as they were in ranking, nevertheless posed a very real threat. They had to be engaged in a calm, deliberate fashion. She knew this, but for some reason, she wasn’t her usual self today; she’d lost her cool. The Beast he just dispatched should have been no problem for her had she dealt with it in her usual composed manner.
He figured it must be the lingering effects of her tournament match. She was still weary, both in body and soul. Things might be different if she’d won, but unfortunately, she didn’t, and her loss was probably weighing heavily on her mind.
“Poht Teurch, here I bear the attendant’s mark. Seventh gift — Holy Weaving Torch! ”
A blazing torch of holy fire materialized in Alicia’s hand. This kind of situation was exactly why she’d refrained from participating in the magic battle expo — so she’d be rested and ready to respond. A wave of purifying flames swept through the remaining Beasts.
“Phew... I think that’s the last of them.”
“...No.”
The numbers didn’t match up. There had been more when he’d first sensed them. A few must have noticed his approach and fled in advance. They had to be hunted down immediately.
“Found them. They’re that way.”
Melia was first to detect their presence. She dashed off immediately.
“Wha— Damn it, wait! Melia!”
Sain hastily rushed after her as she charged toward potentially hostile territory by herself. Something was definitely wrong with her today. She lacked all composure. It felt like the only thing that mattered to her right now was killing Chaos.
His pondering was cut short when two Beasts — the group’s leftovers — closed in on Melia’s distant figure. In a display of her usual dexterity, she danced circles around one of them as she cut it down in a flurry of slashes. But...
“Wha—?!”
...The other one managed to get behind her and catch her unawares as it attacked. The lion-shaped Beast charged at her, and she only managed to get her arms up in a defensive stance before it rammed her with its body, sending her crashing into a tree. She let out a short but pained groan, then immediately moved to counterattack.
“I said stop!”
Sain finally caught up and halted her with a holler. In the process, he also pulled the lion-shaped Beast’s attention to himself. It pounced.
“Whoa!”
He jerked back, narrowly avoiding a powerful jaw that tried to close around his head, and sliced through the creature’s torso with his sword of light. It fell to the ground. Only after confirming it was dead did he let out a breath.
“I told you not to push yourself.”
“I...”
She looked at him and blinked a few times before her eyes widened with the realization that she’d gone a little berserk. He let her chew on that for a while as he scanned the surroundings and confirmed that there were no remaining Chaos. Their presence to the west was completely gone as well, presumably eradicated by Cain. He took out his accessory-shaped light seals and put them back on one by one, reducing his power down to its usual suppressed state. Then, he addressed her.
“All right, talk to me, Maid. What happened?”
“Nothing really. If I have to say something, then I’ll go with... I went back to being my original self.”
She kept her eyes on the ground and avoided meeting his gaze.
“...What do you mean by that?”
“I became an attendant of the holy knight to kill Chaos. That was my original purpose,” she explained. “But something changed. At some point, when I looked in the mirror, I stopped seeing the holy knight’s attendant. I saw your attendant, Master Sain. Your attendant, who was enjoying her peaceful life with you. I always took it for granted that the change was for the better... but now that I think about it, maybe I just lost sight of my goal. Maybe I... betrayed my original purpose.”
“...Nonsense. Fighting Chaos isn’t all there is to your life. It shouldn’t define you.”
“But the consequence of that change was my loss to Cain Theresia. Our past circumstances were the same, yet he ended up trouncing me. That’s the cold, hard truth.” Anger crept into her voice as she talked, and her fists tightened. “At first, we both thought of ourselves as weapons, but while I indulged in a false promise of peace and allowed myself to dull, that man kept training. He never let go of his vengeance, and he let it fuel his drive to keep pushing his limits. It’s hardly a surprise that I lost to him. If you ask me which one of us chose the correct path in life... I think his victory proves it was him.”
Melia smiled with bitter self-derision.
“...Is that what he told you?”
She said nothing. Her silence told him all he needed to know. He’d noticed that her behavior during the match was strange. Now he knew why: Cain had apparently decided to have a rather serious conversation with her while they were pummeling each other. He took a deep breath to compose himself before continuing.
“Listen, Maid. A death wish is not a sign of strength. Do not seek to martyr yourself. Your death will appease none but your own vanity.”
A hasty, suicidal approach would accomplish little in the end anyway. From a pragmatic perspective, slow and steady was both the easier and more reliable way to produce actual results.
“But still, he—”
“He’s wrong.”
Like she described, Cain’s self-destructive fixation on becoming stronger had indeed given him a great deal of power. But that didn’t mean he was right .
“If he truly wants to eradicate Chaos, he should be making friends. Lots of them. True, you couldn’t defeat him alone. But you’re not alone. You have friends — me, Miss Gold, Miss Grim. Look at the bigger picture, and it’s obvious that we’re stronger. He just doesn’t see it because he’s been blinded by his own stubbornness.”
Even in terms of the absolute number of Chaos killed, their combined numbers almost certainly dwarfed his.
“So, Maid,” he said, figuring her pursed-lip silence was a sign that she’d regained her composure, “do you really want to become like him? Do you really think that leaving us and going off to fight all by yourself is the correct path?”
He paused for a second, then softened his tone.
“Maybe you did grow weaker as a result of meeting me, in which case I’m very sorry. But I’m still glad I met you, and I wouldn’t trade the world for it.”
Melia’s lips quivered a little. She bit her lower lip. Then, she drew in a deep breath and slowly let it all out.
“I... am also glad I met you, Master Sain. That much, I know for certain.” She looked up at him. “Thank you. I needed that.”
“No problem. Everyone has an off day sometimes.”
Seeing that she was looking more like her usual self, Sain smiled with relief. The sheer unflappability she displayed on a regular basis made it easy to forget that she wasn’t just tagging along with him for fun; she had her reasons for being here. Melia, he reminded himself, wasn’t perfect. She was just a girl — a girl who, like him, was only fourteen years old.
“It’s all clear to me now,” she said. “Cain Theresia is me — if I hadn’t met you.”
“...So he is.”
He nodded at her statement. Based on what she’d described so far, it seemed a fair conclusion.
“In that case, what I need to do is clear to me as well. Clear and quite simple.” He looked straight at her and declared, “Tomorrow, I’m going to do for him what I did for you.”
A small smile appeared across her lips.
“Are you sure? Unlike me, he’s going to be a tough nut to crack.”
“...You weren’t exactly soft and inviting, either.”
A few upsetting memories made him grimace, but nostalgia kept it half-hearted. A sideward glance revealed the approaching figures of Alicia and Marni, and he promptly signaled to them that the battle was over and everyone was safe.