“Will you help me, Raven?”
Lend me your aid as the Demon Lord’s former right hand. Help me protect this world teetering on a razor’s edge.
“Cease your...prattle...” he spat powerlessly as he hung his head. Suddenly, he retched and groaned in pain. “Agh—?”
“Raven?!”
He toppled forward face-first. His writhing figure overlapped in my mind with the archbishop’s final moments underground—
“No, hang in there!”
I wrapped my arms around him and lifted him back up, but his face was sunken and worn.
“Recoil...?” I muttered.
I’d done my best to leave him with the basic minimum of internal mana he needed in order to sustain his life. So this must have been the strain from all the rapid changes his body had undergone, coming back to hit him all at once.
“Mere slave that I was, I sought to wield the power of a God,” he said. “Is this my penance, then?”
“Stop talking nonsense!” I shouted.
Judging by his condition, healing orisons wouldn’t be enough at this point.
“Screw it!” I picked up my knife from the ground at my side and sliced into my wrist.
“Stop...it...”
“Shut up! I’m not letting it end this way, not after everything—it’d just leave a rotten taste in my mouth!”
I held out my flowing blood to Raven and spoke words of prayer to manifest a miracle. Just like I’d done for Cion underground, if I poured my blood into him and shored it up with formulae, he’d still have a chance.
“Defective or not, this is the blood of the ‘First’ you speak of. If you take it in, you’ll be able to regenerate your lost organs, at least temporarily—it’s already been tested. I’ll guide the process, so you just—”
Raven shoved away my hand with a stump of an arm.
“This is no time to be stubborn, dammit!” I yelled.
“No... Try as you will, I’m past saving...”
He didn’t need the blood of the First—he’d consumed that already. It wasn’t his body that was broken, but his body’s ingrained memory of life itself. He’d overwritten it and patched it together countless times, and it couldn’t maintain its original shape anymore.
“You can’t give up! I— I won’t allow it!”
Even if I absolutely hated this damn devil’s guts—even if he’d done awful things to Cion and to me, and I wanted him to die—
“You need to live! Live and atone for what you’ve done!”
—I couldn’t just let him get killed and have that be the end of it.
As I shouted at him, a smile formed on his crumbling face, and he gave a croaking laugh.
“Like father, like daughter...” he rasped out.
“Huh?”
“I won’t accept you... So you need to keep on rejecting me as well. Reject me and the outmoded notions I clung to—that I could only reclaim what I’d lost by stealing from others...”
“Raven!”
I tried to force my blood into his mouth, but his body was already falling apart and scattering on the wind. All that remained of him—of this slave who’d burned with hatred and resentment until he expended every ounce of his life—was a fine ash, clean and white like snow.
The only things he left behind were the clothes he’d been wearing and...
“A ring?”
A slightly tarnished ring fell to the ground, strung onto a chain that he must have worn around his neck.
“Damn son of a bitch.” Veiss picked it up—looking closer, I could see a ring with a similar design on a chain hanging from his neck as well.
“Um.” I stared up at him, completely thrown for a loop.
“No, that ain’t it,” he growled. “Bastard just stole it. From my fiancée.”
“I-I see...”
For a second there, I’d been sure they must’ve had that kind of relationship. Huh.
“So, what’re we doing now? Do we need to fight it out with you folks?” The Golden Lion had been silently watching as everything played out, but now he spoke up with an easy smile. There was no trace of hostility in his voice.
I looked to Veiss, but he just scowled at me, and Cion looked confusedly back and forth between the two of us.
Well now, what’s to be done here?
While I tried to come up with an angle, the first one to speak was everyone’s favorite former royal knight captain.
“We don’t gotta bother with that. If we’re going at it with you, then we’d better change weapons.” He stepped forward, leaning on a bearded man for support, and held up a soot-stained liquor bottle he’d pulled out from somewhere. “If you ain’t had enough of a fight yet, then how about a drinking contest? Truth is, my guys love booze more than battles—always gotta send the dead off with a proper party.”
He bantered casually, and the Golden Lion responded in kind.
“Well then, we’d better open up our special casks. Can’t send off our comrades with the cheap stuff—it won’t even be enough to get drunk on.”
“My, this really is far more civilized than battling to the death, isn’t it?” As though he’d been waiting for the right moment to butt in, Glasses stepped forward, clapping his hands appreciatively.
“I’d quite like to drink Miss Alicia’s holy water...”
Behind him trailed the Horny Slut, guided along by an attendant while everyone around her recoiled in disgust.
“Bunch of drunks.” The wolf-faced champion scowled out at what had just been a battlefield; it was still a hellish scene, but life was slowly starting to return. He grabbed his sword back from Cion. “If everyone’s just gonna screw around, then I’m out. Cardinal Dipshit can handle the rest.”
“But of course, Sir Champion. My apologies again for my unreasonable request.”
Of course Glasses had been behind it all somehow.
Veiss made to disappear as usual, but—
“M-Master!”
—Cion frantically grabbed his hand to stop him.
“What.”
“No, I— Um... I-I can still call you Master, right...?”
“You tell me. Is this what your Master looks like?”
Cion was still having trouble wrapping her head around it all, and she stumbled over her words. Meanwhile, for his part, Veiss was utterly unwilling to communicate properly with her.
I sighed with exasperation. “If you’re worried about her, then why don’t you just stay with her? Are you an idiot?”
The eyes of a beast turned back to me with an annoyed glare.
You watch over her from a distance, you cast defensive spells when assassins come after her, you go around killing the guys behind it all, and whenever she’s in a tight spot, you show up out of nowhere to save her—seriously, who the hell do you think you are?
“If you care about Cion, then tell her so.”
“Look, brat...”
While we sniped back and forth, Cion kept gazing at Veiss with worry in her eyes. They were the eyes of a kid being abandoned by a parent. The fact was, Veiss had left Cion behind and let her think he’d died. Then, when he’d finally shown up alive again, he’d just called her a nuisance and told her to throw away her sword—he hadn’t said any of the things he really needed to.
“Alicia, I...”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “As awful as he looks, I can assure you that this man is your Master.”
“I— Right.” Cion looked up at him and gave a little nod. “I know I’ll never be like you, Master, but I’m still going to fight just as hard as you. So, keep watching me. I’ll make sure you never have to come out ever again!”
The Hero clenched her fist tight, determination filling her small frame. The former champion’s response was flat and indifferent.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
With those words, the wolfman walked off into the distance, his greatsword slung across his back. His retreating figure was something out of an epic ballad—a champion through and through.
“That tail is honest to a fault, though...”
It wagged back and forth like the tail of a dog getting praised by its owner, drawing laughter from all around—so the champion didn’t turn back even once. I would’ve loved to run in front and see the look on his face, but I restrained myself as a small act of mercy.
The two of us saw him off as he walked away—holding back our laughter all the while.
“Now then...”
I turned to Cion. In one hand was my bible; in the other, my knife and my ring. I brandished the knife at Cion and smiled sweetly.
“Would you be so kind as to die for me, Sir Hero?”