Chapter 102: Final Raid III

"And here comes the resolution~!"

Freya stood at the railing of her box, both hands resting on it, an enormous smile on her lips, looking down at the place where everything had just collapsed.

She had chosen this particular balcony for exactly that reason. Not only for the view of the square. For the view of what lay beneath it.

Down below, in the undercity of Evangel, the dust was settling.

It came down slowly, in sheets, and as it thinned, the hole in the ceiling let through the red light of the sky, which fell in a slanted column and lit up what stood underneath.

And all around it, the civilians were there.

There were thousands of them, gathered in a ring, on the landings, in the galleries, on the stone stairways climbing back toward the upper levels. The ones who had been sheltered. The ones who had been brought down here to keep them out of reach of the abominations.

They stood all around the exact spot where the ground had given way, and stones were still falling among them at intervals.

Nobody was speaking.

What they saw inside that column of red light did not belong to their world. It was a scene out of mythology, one of the kind they had been told as children without ever imagining they might see one.

A demon stood there, in the middle of the rubble, an enormous black sword in its hand.

Around it, dozens of adventurers lay on the ground. All wounded. All bleeding. Some not moving at all.

And standing, alone, one man was holding that sword back.

Injured everywhere, his armour torn away in plates, his body nearly bare beneath what was left of it, he was holding the black blade above him with his one sword, a knee already on the ground, and he wasn’t letting go.

Aldric. The rage still in his eyes.

Not a single civilian dared take a step.

Not one dared step back either, or leave, or turn away, as though turning your back on a thing like that were a mistake you never got to undo.

Then a voice went up.

It was an ordinary man, in a workman’s tunic, somewhere on the first landing.

"Come on, Paydragon! You can do it!"

Then another.

"PAYDRAGON!"

Then another still, further off, higher up.

"OUR HERO!"

And the whole ring took it up.

They were arranged there like an audience, in a crown around the exact spot that had just caved in, as though someone had brought them and placed them, and they shouted Paydragon’s name until the galleries threw it back.

They put everything into it.

Everything they had been through since the execution of the White Saintess and the demons’ appearance.

The fear, the running, the dead, the waiting in the dark and even more.

Everything that had been building for years—the inequalities, the abuses, the injustices, the anger they had swallowed, the lives they had been forced to endure. Everything that had only grown worse over the past few weeks.

Every scrap of hope they had left and all the hope they no longer had.

They laid all of it on one man’s shoulders.

And something answered.

An orange light came down out of the sky.

It came from very high up, passed through the hole in the floor of the square, fell straight through the red column and settled over Aldric, wrapping him entirely.

The shouting stopped all at once.

It was warm. They could feel it from the galleries, all the way up the stairways, and it pushed the red back around it for several paces.

In her box, Freya had leaned out over the railing and wasn’t missing a moment of it.

"A miracle," she murmured. "Little Paydragon is growing up at last~!"

Inside the light, Aldric’s body was regenerating.

The wounds closed one after another. The blood cleared from his skin. What had been broken set itself back into place, and he wasn’t merely healing. He was being rebuilt.

And in his vision, the notifications appeared.

[ Congratulations! The world and the god of truth recognise you as a worthy hero! ]

[ You become a true hero and inscribe your legend into the annals of the world! ]

[ You have received the greater blessing of the god of truth! ]

Nobody in the galleries understood what they were looking at.

But all of them felt it. A hero. A real one. Hope, standing right there in front of them, a few paces away.

"GO ON, PAYDRAGON!"

It was a little girl this time, at the very bottom of the first landing.

And beneath the cheering of his people, Aldric’s knee came up.

The demon saw it and bore down.

It put both hands on the black sword and threw its entire weight into it, and the ground gave under Aldric’s feet, the stone splitting into a star around his boots.

The knee kept rising.

"You’ll always be this weak, little hero!"

The blade came down further. Aldric’s arm bent under it, degree by degree, until his shoulder nearly touched the ground and the black edge came to rest against his own guard.

He didn’t let go.

He was finished. His body had been made new, but everything else was empty, and the demon was pressing down with a crushing force that left nothing behind but helplessness.

So he stopped holding it with his arms.

He could hear his name.

He could hear it from the galleries, from the stairways, from the landings above him, hundreds of voices calling it at the same time without knowing whether it made any difference at all.

He could hear the little girl on the first landing.

He could hear the voice of the man in the workman’s tunic, who hadn’t stopped once since the beginning.

He thought of the bodies up on the square. Of the one who had come back first. Of the line of knights that had held long enough for the evacuation to get through.

He thought of what he had sworn, hand over his heart, before Apoltheos and before his mother.

And something came back up.

"AAAAAAAAAAAH!"

It started in his legs.

His knee came level, his foot planted, and his whole body straightened in one motion, from the bottom up, shoulders last.

The black sword went with it.

It was driven upward with such force that it tore free of the demon’s hands and spun away through the air, and the demon went with it, toppling backwards.

The two orange wings unfurled at Aldric’s back across the entire width of the cavern.

"CHARGE OF THE BRAVE!"

The ground exploded beneath his feet.

He crossed the distance faster than anyone could follow.

In her box, Freya grabbed Kaguya by the shoulder and shook her without taking her eyes off the scene. "It’s time," she said, as Kaguya was still busy looking at something else.

And the sword reached the demon’s chest.

CLAP—

It went in at once.

It passed through the entire length of its torso, and the demon screamed, a scream that climbed up through the hole and out across the square, while its body opened in two and dropped onto the rubble.

Only the upper half of it was left.

Aldric walked toward it, one step at a time, wrapped in the orange glow, and the demon dragged itself backwards on its two arms, hauling what was left of it over the stones.

All eight of its eyes were on the man coming toward it.

And for the first time since it had come out of that crack, they were no longer drifting apart.

It opened its mouth to say something.

Aldric didn’t stop to listen.

He raised the sword in both hands above his head, and the whole cavern went silent at once, hundreds of voices dying together, because every one of them knew what was coming.

The blade came down.

A crack opened behind the demon in the same instant.

It threw itself backwards into it without a word, and the sword passed through the space where it had been before striking the ground, which split along its entire length with a sound the galleries threw back three times.

The crack closed.

There was nothing in front of him.

Aldric stayed there, the sword buried in the stone, both hands still on it, staring at the empty space.

It wasn’t dead. He knew that. He knew it the moment the crack closed, and he knew too that there had been nothing he could do about it, that there had never been anything he could do about it, and that it was over all the same.

His fingers came off the grip.

He dropped to his knees, then onto his side, and the sword stayed standing on its own behind him.

Above, the red began to withdraw.

It drew back slowly, from the centre toward the edges, leaving the galleries one after another, and the light of day took its place behind it.

It came down through the hole, white and ordinary, and settled over the man lying in the rubble.

Then the cavern erupted.

They all shouted at once, from the landings, the stairways, the galleries, and the noise grew until you couldn’t tell one voice from another. Some clapped their hands. Others struck the stone. Men who had never met grabbed each other by the shoulders and shook without saying anything at all.

For most of them, it had been the worst night of their lives. They had lost people they knew, family, friends, and many didn’t yet know who.

But it was over now.

Two small figures broke through the ring at a run.

They crossed the rubble without paying attention to anything, and one of the two fell before she got there, picked herself up and kept going.

"BIG BROTHER!"

Amélia and Ophélie fell on him in tears and wrapped their arms around him, and he, who no longer had the strength to move a single muscle, closed his own around them.

A few paces away, Gauvin was watching them, a tear at the corner of his eye.

He was looking at his young master like that, with both his sisters in his arms, and he thought to himself that he could die in peace now.